Time Line of Decipherment
16th
century
Surviving
texts
The
quest to decipher Maya hieroglyphs began with the very Spanish invaders whose
hegemonic rule did so much to wipe out the ancient Maya script. Among them was
the conquistador Hernando Cortes, who led massacres in Mexico but who also,
some scholars believe, had the famous Dresden Codex—one of just four Maya
illustrated books surviving today—shipped back to Spain. Another was
Diego de Landa, a friar bent on replacing indigenous with Christian beliefs. In
what amounts to a crime against the cultural heritage of humanity, Landa
orchestrated the burning in 1562 of hundreds if not thousands of Maya
bark-paper books, which he deemed heretical. Yet four years later, Landa wrote
a manuscript about the Maya world called "Relation of the Things of
Yucatan" (above). Together, this manuscript and the Dresden Codex proved
essential in the later decoding of the Maya's calendar system and their
advanced understanding of astronomy and mathematics.