We're at the Getty Center in Los
Angeles in front of the oldest
book ever found in the Americas.
This is the "Códice Maya de Mé
xico" made between the 11th and
12th centuries. Given how few
Mesoamerican books made prior to
the Spanish invasions exist,
whether due to environmental
issues like rain and humidity,
or even the targeted destruction
by Spanish Friars and
conquistadors in the wake of the
invasions in the early 16th
century, it is truly amazing to
be in front of this Maya book
today.
This book has a controversial
history. It was long considered
to be a fake due to the strange
circumstances in which it
surfaced. It appeared in a
private collection in Mexico
City in the mid-1960s. The story
is that it was found looted in a
cave in the State of Chiapas,
Tabasco, Mexico. When this book
was finally shown to specialists,
they quickly discounted it as a
fake because it didn't look like
other existing Maya books, of
which there are only three
others.
This is the only Maya book made
prior to the Spanish invasions
that still remains in Mexico.
In 2017 and 2018, independently
working groups of specialists
gathered together to analyze
different aspects of this book
to determine once and for all,
whether or not it was an
extremely sophisticated forgery,
or if it was, in fact, one of
the four surviving Maya books
made before the arrival of the
Spanish.
This doesn't look like a bound
book that we might find in a
library or a bookstore today,
and yet, this was a typical way
of making a book in
Mesoamerica. What is really
striking to me is how thick the
pages are.
This book was made using long
strips of the inner bark of a
fig tree, and then those strips
were stacked on top of each
other in three layers, and then
thin layers of plaster were put
over it, leaving that little
hinges in between the pages, so
this book could fold up like a
screen or almost like an
accordion.
If we look to some of the other
surviving Maya codices, they are
so detailed. Here, what I find
so immediately captivating is
how the artists or the scribe
has provided the fundamentals. I
can easily see all the forms
because they've been so
carefully articulated. One of
the other important aspects of
this Codex is that we can also
still see some of the
preparatory drawings that the
artist laid down onto the page
before placing the paint onto
the page itself. If we look at
page four, for instance, we can
see these thin red lines
and we can also see the artists
felt liberty to alter what they
had initially laid down on the
page.
The color palette is spare. The
white background of the plaster
shows through in reds and blacks.
There's one instance in the book
where you see a small patch of
blue. The black made from
charcoal, there's a brick red
made from hematite, and then
there's another red made from an
insect called cochineal that's
only found on cactus. That color
of red was not local to the
artists that made this book. The
blue color that shows up on page
10 was an exotic rare material
called Maya blue.
It demonstrates that there was
an interest in using some of
these more precious materials
that would have been costly and
sourced from far away. Yet,
they're used here as a way of
further highlighting the
importance of this particular
Codex. Books were important
repositories of knowledge.
While this dates to the 11th or
12th centuries, we know that
bookmaking practices extend
farther back in time and this is
a very important cultural
tradition among peoples in
Mesoamerica.
Each page of this book follows a
common design scheme. You can
break down each page into four
parts. On the left-hand side,
there's a column of glyphs and
those are calendrical dates, a
260-day calendar that the Maya
used and continue to use today.
In the upper center, there's a
circular red object with a knot
on top which contains a number.
The way you read numbers for the
Maya is bar is five, and a dot
is one. You've add up the
numbers. There's a deity that
stands facing to the left-hand
side of the page, and that deity
is confronting, restraining, or
killing a captive or an object.
Why the scribe or artists would
have followed these particular
conventions is because this is a
book that is relaying
information about the cycle of
the planet, Venus.
Venus was extremely important in
Mesoamerica because it was
considered a dangerous planet.
Venus is always close to the sun.
It either rises before the sun
does at dawn, once the Morning
Star, or it follows the sun into
the earth as it sinks into the
western horizon when Venus is
the Evening Star. Venus has
four phases and it's got an
extremely difficult pattern to
observe and predict. Ancient
Maya astronomers were really
careful observers of this
phenomenon and they were among
the only ancient cultures that
actually recognized Venus as the
Morning Star and Venus as the
Evening Star as being the same
planetary body. This book
follows the cycle of Venus and
its 584-day cycle over a course
of 140 years. Each page predicts
when one of the four phases of
Venus is going to start.
This goes back to the logic of
having these established
conventions on each page is that
it's following a particular
cycle that is very consistent,
that the Maya are observing and
documenting, so having that
consistency allows you to track
that cycle of Venus very clearly.
One of the important functions
of this book would be to
determine when to do or to not
do certain things when Venus
would appear in one of its
phases. Other sources tell us
that the first appearance of the
light of Venus could be either
favorable or unfavorable for
things like warfare. It could
cause droughts, it could cause
famine and harm crops, and it
could cause harm to people and
to children.
Let's look more closely at page
four. Most of the page is
devoted to the deity governing
this part of the cycle along
with a captive.
This particular page deals with
the Morning Star. On these
particular dates of the first
appearance of Morning Star, the
deity in charge is this deity
with this long curling nose.
He's called K'awiil, and he's
the God of lightning. He's also
a God of rulership. He's
associated with flint knives and
axes because he's holding the
spear that's got these wavy
lines on the blade and that
actually says that it's made out
of flint.
Showing him in the act of
capturing and defeating an enemy
is related to larger ideas about
the cycle of Venus. The deities
governing this cycle could be
perceived as dangerous, or these
could be times where bad things
could happen. Showing a scene of
captivity or showing a scene of
defeat is pointing or signaling
to how people felt about these
different phases. It's not so
much showing us what would
happen, but what could happen
during these phases. Page six,
it's actually where we see a
skeletal deity, overseeing a
different moment in the cycle of
Venus, and this is Evening Star.
An Evening Star here is governed
by a frightful skeletal deity
that has a blunt knife sticking
out of his nasal cavity. He's
holding a giant jagged blade up
with his left hand and he's
holding the hair of a captive
whose head he's freshly severed
from its neck and there's large
bouts of blood spilling out.
You see also their fleshless
mouth. We see the teeth that had
been exposed. If we look at the
lower portion, we even see these
squiggly lines that terminate in
a circle, which is a convention
for bone, so we're getting the
impression that we have a
skeletal or a partially de-
fleshed being that is terrifying.
Formerly, it was believed that
only the first appearance of
Morning Star was a dangerous
time, but this scene makes it
clear that other phases were
also dangerous.
Used by a community priest or
community elder or someone with
the knowledge to use this as a
tool of prognostication or a
tool of planning for what's to
come, this book would have been
a powerful tool in a particular
Maya community. While we don't
know exactly which community
this was used in because of that
history of how it was found in
the 1960s, the Códice Maya de Mé
xico can still be so useful for
us today to have a lens into
what the Maya of the 11/12th
century were thinking and how
they were recording information
and also just gives us a
brilliant insight into what
amazing astronomers they were.