Four screenfold books produced by professional Maya scribes between the 11th and 14th centuries CE are the only confirmed surviving written records of the Maya civilization in hieroglyphic script that remain legible and intact. They are designated the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Maya Codex of Mexico, formerly known as the Grolier Codex. Every other codex produced during the pre-Columbian period was destroyed. Spanish colonial sources written in the years immediately following the conquest document that thousands of bark-paper books were in active circulation across Maya communities in the 16th century. Alonso de Zorita, a Spanish colonial official, recorded in 1540 that he personally saw numerous such books in the Guatemalan highlands that indigenous informants told him documented more than 800 years of history. All of them are gone. On July 12, 1562, Franciscan friar Diego de Landa Calderón ordered an unauthorized inquisition ceremony called an auto-da-fé in the town of Maní, Yucatán, at which a contested but confirmed minimum of 27 codices were burned publicly, along with approximately 5,000 Maya sacred objects and cult images. Landa himself wrote: "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction." Maya historian George Stuart has estimated the total losses from Landa's campaign and the broader Spanish colonial destruction as numbering in the hundreds, possibly thousands of books. The four surviving codices represent what scholars currently describe as a fraction of a fraction of the full written record of Maya civilization.
Material and Craftsmanship
Maya bark paper, called huun in Mayan languages, was the writing surface for all four surviving codices. The paper was produced from the inner bark of the wild fig tree, Ficus cotinifolia, the same species used for bark paper production across Mesoamerica. The bark was stripped from the tree, soaked in water, then beaten with stone tools against a flat surface until the fibers separated and felted into a continuous flat sheet. This production process was a specialized craft restricted to trained artisans. The finished paper was more durable and held pigment more effectively than papyrus, which the Romans used during the same period in which the Maya developed huun paper, around the 5th century CE. Scientific analysis of the Maya Codex of Mexico, conducted as part of its authentication review, confirmed that the paper is three-ply felted amate: fine horizontal fibers on the surface with coarser vertical fibers sandwiched between them. The pages were cut from the finished paper using a hafted obsidian blade, the sharpest cutting implement available to Maya artisans. Multiple sheets were joined at their lateral edges, possibly using gum extracted from orchid bulbs, which functions as an effective adhesive documented in surviving Mesoamerican craft traditions.
After joining, the long continuous strip was coated on both sides with a thin white layer of fine stucco or gesso, compounded from ground limestone and a binding agent. This stucco coating created a smooth, non-absorbent surface that allowed pigment to be applied cleanly without spreading into the paper fibers. The stucco simultaneously provided a white base that made the applied colors visible at full intensity. The codex was then folded accordion-style, back and forth in equal-width sections, creating a screenfold book whose pages, when stacked, could be compressed for transport and storage. When unfolded, the complete strip lay flat in a continuous sequence. The front and back covers were produced from wood coated in stucco and likely painted. No original cover has survived on any of the four codices. Evidence from the Madrid Codex indicates it was at one point bound to a second volume. The covers may have been wrapped in jaguar pelt, based on the association of the jaguar with divine authority and sacred books in documented Maya symbolic culture. Page dimensions across all four codices are consistent: approximately 20 centimeters in height and 10 centimeters in width per leaf, establishing a standardized format across different production centers and periods.
Pigments were applied using very fine brushes producing lines of controlled precision. Black ink was derived from carbon-based materials including soot and charcoal mixed with a binding agent. Red came from hematite and other iron oxide compounds. The distinctive Maya blue, produced from a combination of indigo dye and palygorskite clay that created an unusually stable compound resistant to both acid and biological degradation, appears across all four codices and was not replicated in any other culture. Chemical analysis of Maya blue has confirmed that it was prepared by heating indigo and palygorskite together at a specific temperature, producing a color that has retained its intensity across eight centuries of storage in varying conditions. The scribes who produced the codices were professional specialists designated by their own specific Maya title. They worked under the divine patronage of the Howler Monkey Gods, the twin deities of writing and the arts identified in Maya cosmology as the divine protectors of scribal knowledge.
Form and Features
Each codex is a single long strip of amate paper, stucco-coated, folded accordion-style, with all content distributed across the front and back of the continuous strip. The Dresden Codex totals 78 pages on 39 double-sided sheets and measures 3.56 meters in total length when unfolded, with each sheet measuring 20.5 centimeters in height by 10.0 centimeters in width. Four pages are empty. The Dresden was written by eight different scribes, each identifiable by scholars through their individual glyph formation style, painting technique, and page layout preferences. The Madrid Codex is the longest of the four at approximately 6.7 meters when fully unfolded, consisting of 112 pages across 56 double-sided sheets, each page measuring 23.2 by 12.2 centimeters. Glyphic analysis has identified as many as eight or nine different scribes contributing to the Madrid's production in consecutive sections. The Paris Codex survives in the most damaged condition of the three European-held codices, with its outer pages severely degraded from moisture and biological activity during its storage period. The Maya Codex of Mexico survives as 11 pages of what was originally an estimated 20-page document, measuring 1.3 meters in its current fragmented state. Based on the dimensions of its surviving pages, the complete original would have extended to at least 2.16 meters.
Each page of a codex is organized into registers, horizontal bands that divide the page into distinct content zones. Within each register, a deity or supernatural figure is depicted, accompanied by hieroglyphic glyphs identifying the figure and specifying what action or phenomenon it represents. Almanac tables are laid out in columns of glyph blocks flanking the deity images, with numerical coefficients written using the Maya vigesimal dot-and-bar system. The Dresden Codex contains pages structured as Venus tables, in which the calculated appearances and disappearances of Venus as the morning and evening star are charted over multiple calendar cycles with a mathematical precision that modern astronomers have confirmed achieves an error margin of only two hours per Venus cycle over a 384-year span. The lunar tables in the Dresden predict solar and lunar eclipses through a series of intervals. Mars movement tables appear in the Madrid and Paris codices. The 13-constellation Maya zodiac occupies pages 23 and 24 of the Paris Codex in the most complete surviving form of this calendar instrument.
Function and Use
The codices functioned as operational manuals for trained Maya priests and day-keepers, the specialists responsible for maintaining the calendrical and ritual schedule that governed Maya community life. They were not public documents. Access was restricted to priests, nobility, and the specialized scribal class. Their content determined when specific ceremonies were performed, which deity presided over each period, what offerings were appropriate, and what outcomes could be anticipated from particular courses of action. At the ceremony called Pocam, the Washing, Maya priests ritually purified a codex with water before reading its predictions for the coming year aloud, establishing the codex as an active participant in the ceremony rather than a passive reference text.
The 260-day ritual calendar, called the tzolk'in, forms the structural backbone of all four codices. This calendar divided the year into 20 named day-signs combined with 13 numerical coefficients, generating 260 unique day designations before repeating. Each day combination carried its own deity association, favorable or unfavorable omen, and ritual prescription. The Dresden Codex's almanac sections specified for each day which deity was active, what the atmospheric conditions would be, and what a person born on that day could expect from their life. These predictions were not read as probabilities. They were understood as fixed cosmological facts accessible only through the codex and interpretable only through trained priestly expertise.
The Venus tables of the Dresden Codex tracked Venus as a war deity. When Venus rose as the morning star after its period of invisibility, the event was understood as a dangerous moment requiring specific protective ritual. Rulers and armies consulted the Venus tables before initiating military campaigns, because launching an action when Venus was in an unfavorable position was understood to guarantee defeat. The eclipse tables allowed priests to anticipate events understood as attacks by supernatural beings on the sun and moon. Eclipses without warning were experienced as crises. Advance calculation of eclipse occurrence through the Dresden's lunar tables gave priests sufficient preparation time to organize the protective ceremonies required to preserve cosmic order. The almanacs governing planting and harvesting in the Madrid Codex linked each agricultural decision to its correct calendrical moment, embedding farming practice within the same sacred framework as warfare and priestly ceremony.
Cultural Context
Maya writing was a fully developed logosyllabic system, combining phonetic syllable signs with logograms representing complete words or concepts. Approximately 800 individual glyphs have been identified in the complete corpus of Maya writing across codices, stone monuments, ceramic vessels, and portable objects. The scribal profession occupied a position of high social prestige within Maya society. Scribes were trained from childhood in specialized institutions attached to royal courts and temples. Their craft was understood as a sacred activity practiced under divine supervision. The act of writing was called ts'ihb in Maya, the same word used for painting and carving, establishing all three mark-making traditions as expressions of a single sacred practice rather than separate crafts.
The burning of the codices at Maní on July 12, 1562, was not an isolated act. It was the most publicly documented moment in a continuous campaign of written knowledge destruction that began with the first Spanish arrivals in the Yucatán in the 1520s and continued until the last known codex destruction at Tayasal, Guatemala, in 1697, over 175 years after initial contact. Other Spanish clergy documented seeing codices burned by missionaries throughout this period. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish friar and outspoken critic of the colonial treatment of indigenous peoples, wrote that he personally witnessed books burned by monks who believed their contents would harm indigenous people's conversion to Christianity. The last fully functioning Maya hieroglyphic writing tradition using the pre-Columbian script died with the last scribes trained before systematic suppression. Colonial-era Maya nobles produced alphabetic books in Yucatec Maya language, called the Books of Chilam Balam, using Spanish letters to write their own language after hieroglyphic writing was banned, preserving fragments of the intellectual tradition through the only medium the colonial authority permitted.
The de Landa alphabet, produced by the same friar who ordered the Maní burning, was his attempt to document Maya writing by asking Maya informants to write the glyph corresponding to each letter of the Spanish alphabet. De Landa assumed Maya writing was alphabetic, as Spanish was, and his informants, unable to convey a logosyllabic system through a Spanish alphabetic framework, produced answers that were correct in a way de Landa could not understand. The de Landa alphabet was recovered from his manuscript Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán in the 19th century. It proved instrumental in the 20th-century decipherment of Maya writing, not because it accurately described the system, but because it preserved enough phonetic data that later scholars, particularly Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov in his 1952 paper, could use it as a starting point for identifying syllabic values of individual glyphs.
Discovery and Preservation
The Dresden Codex entered European documentary records in 1739 when Johann Christian Götze, director of the Royal Library at Dresden, purchased it from a private collector in Vienna. Götze believed the codex had been sent from Mexico to Spain as part of the tribute dispatched by Hernán Cortés to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519, as other Maya objects from Mexico were documented in the same collection. The codex was catalogued into the Royal Library of Dresden in 1744. Alexander von Humboldt published five pages of the Dresden Codex in his 1810 atlas Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de l'Amérique, the first reproduction of any Maya codex pages in print. Lord Kingsborough published the first full copy in his 1831 Antiquities of Mexico. The codex suffered severe water damage during the Allied bombing of Dresden on February 13 to 15, 1945. Portions of multiple pages were damaged by water used to extinguish the resulting fires. The Sächsische Landesbibliothek, the Saxon State Library in Dresden, currently holds and conserves the codex, displaying it in two sections preserved between glass panes since 1835.
The Madrid Codex was discovered in Spain during the 19th century in two separate pieces held in two separate collections, their connection unrecognized until 1888 when French scholar Léon de Rosny identified that both fragments were sections of the same original document. The two pieces were studied independently by different scholars for decades before this discovery. The Museo de América in Madrid holds the codex today. The Paris Codex was found in 1859 by Léon de Rosny in a basket of old papers in a chimney corner of the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris, where it had been stored and ignored for an undetermined period. It is currently held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The Maya Codex of Mexico was found in a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1965 by looters operating in the region. Mexican collector Dr. José Sáenz acquired it from the looters and displayed it at the Grolier Club in New York City in 1971, from which its original designation Grolier Codex derived. Its authenticity was disputed from the moment of its public debut. Eric Thompson, the dominant figure of 20th-century Maya scholarship, declared it a forgery. Michael Coe submitted a fragment for radiocarbon dating in the 1970s, which returned a date of 1230 CE plus or minus 130 years. Thompson acknowledged the paper was genuinely old but maintained the painted content was modern. Independent analyses through the 1980s and 1990s produced mixed conclusions. In 2016, a comprehensive authentication study by Michael Coe, Stephen Houston, Mary Miller, and Karl Taube concluded with certainty that the codex was genuine, that its iconography was accurately pre-Columbian, that its astronomical content was internally consistent with known Maya Venus tables, and that no forger operating in 1965 possessed the knowledge required to produce it. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History formally authenticated the codex in 2018 and renamed it the Maya Codex of Mexico. It has been held at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City since 2016 and is the only one of the four codices currently held in the Americas. It is not on public display.
Why It Matters
The four surviving Maya codices are the only remaining intact written records through which the full operational framework of Maya astronomy, ritual calendrics, agricultural timing, and priestly ceremonial practice can be studied in the form in which it was actually used by the Maya themselves. Every other category of Maya documentary evidence, stone monument inscriptions, ceramic vessel texts, and portable object glyphs, preserves fragments of this system. The codices preserve the system as a functioning whole. The Dresden Codex's Venus tables, whose mathematical precision achieves an error of two hours per Venus cycle over a 384-year calculation span using only bar-and-dot arithmetic without telescopes or mechanical instruments, constitute the most precisely documented achievement of naked-eye astronomical calculation in the pre-Columbian Americas. The event at Maní on July 12, 1562, in which a minimum of 27 books encoding centuries of accumulated knowledge were publicly burned by a colonial religious authority who acknowledged in writing that the books caused the Maya "much affliction," is one of the most precisely documented acts of deliberate intellectual destruction in recorded history. Diego de Landa's subsequent conviction that his knowledge of Maya culture required him to document it in his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, completed as part of his legal defense in Spain, produced the same man's written record of the system he had burned, preserving through his own account fragments of what his fire had consumed. The de Landa alphabet extracted from that document became the instrument through which Yuri Knorozov began the decipherment of Maya writing in 1952, making the ultimate recovery of the writing system partially dependent on the testimony of the man most responsible for destroying the texts written in it.