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.