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Maya codices (sg.: codex) are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods .
The Codex Style, as the name already clarifies, has a strong resemblance to the surviving Postclassic Maya codices. Comparing the scenes painted in the corpus of codex style vases, artistic devices such as the contrast of a black line on a white (or cream) background with the addition of a hieroglyphic caption illustrating the iconography recalled the uses of color and space in the Dresden ...
The Codex was first displayed at the Grolier Club in New York, hence its name. The first Mexican owner, Josué Saenz, claimed that the manuscript had been recovered from a cave in the Mexican state of Chiapas in the 1960s, along with a mosaic mask, a wooden box, a knife handle, as well as a child's sandal and a piece of rope, along with some blank pages of amate (pre-Columbian fig-bark paper).
The Maya dead were laid to rest with maize placed in their mouth. Maize, highly important in Maya culture, is a symbol of rebirth and also was food for the dead for the journey to the otherworld . Similarly, a jade or stone bead placed in the mouth served as currency for this journey.
During the 19th century, the word 'codex' became popular to designate any pictorial manuscript in the Mesoamerican tradition. In reality, pre-Columbian manuscripts are, strictly speaking, not codices, since the strict librarian usage of the word denotes manuscript books made of vellum, papyrus and other materials besides paper, that have been sewn on one side. [1]
During the ceremony on July 12, 1562, a disputed number of Maya codices (according to Landa, 27 books) and approximately 5,000 Maya cult images were burned. Only three pre-Columbian books of Maya hieroglyphics (also known as a codex) and fragments of a fourth [4] [5] [6] are known to have survived.
The Dresden Codex is a Maya book, which was believed to be the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. [1] However, in September 2018 it was proven that the Maya Codex of Mexico , previously known as the Grolier Codex, is, in fact, older by about a century. [ 2 ]
The Madrid Codex, a Postclassic hieroglyphic Maya book, has an illustration of sacrifice by heart extraction, with the victim stretched over an arched stone. [32] Among the Kʼicheʼ of highland Guatemala, human sacrifice was performed to the Kʼicheʼ gods.