The discovery of Maya codices spans 500 years and is complicated by the cruelty of the Spanish conquest, the severity of the Spanish Inquisition, the neglect of the Bourbon Kings, the xenophobia of colonial Spain, and the impenetrable jungle that housed Maya ruins. The grand cities of this scientific civilization lay buried beneath the luxuriant vegetation of the tropical jungle for six centuries before the conquistadors landed on the coast of Mexico, but a millennium would pass after the Maya collapse before the outside world knew of their existence. However, the riddle of Maya achievements would stay a mystery for an additional century after the discovery of the ruined civilization. When the Maya code was broken, it revealed the amazing truths of their philosophy, history, and scientific accomplishments.
It is a historic tragedy that the royal chronicles of Spain, carefully transcribed by the priests and the conquistadors, did not provide narrative or illustrative images of the magnificent pre-Columbian cities. The only accounts of the magnificent cities are off-hand references in letters to the Spanish royal court and to King Carlos V. The single reference from Cortés relating to pre-Columbian architecture compared the streets of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán to the streets of Madrid, and the high-rise Templo Mayor to the soaring cathedral of Seville. Letters from one of Cortés’s captains, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, described the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlán as a great enclosure of courts that are larger than the Plaza of Salamanca in Spain.
The remarks from Cortes and Del Castillo are the sole reports by the conquistadors relating to a description of pre-Colombian cities. These minimal firsthand accounts formed the total of European images, leading to misconceptions of the configuration of the destroyed Aztec city. Today, it is difficult to believe that sketches or detailed narratives were not prepared to describe images of the most magnificent living city in the New World. However, this lack of interest in art and architecture reflected the skewed mentality of the hard-bitten conquistadors and the overzealous priests who came to rule the Maya world. The correspondence of the conquistadors did not describe or report the existence of ruined Maya cities in the south of New Spain.
Francisco de Montejo, governor and captain general of the Yucatán, and his band of conquistadors had little interest in the ruins of the Maya civilization. The abandoned Maya cities did not contain booty for enriching the Spanish court. The Franciscan priests were well aware of the ancient Maya cities. However, the priests brought their own religion to the Yucatán and were devoted to destroying the religion of the indigenous Maya culture and converting them to Catholicism. The colonizers’ sole interest in the fate of the ruined cities lay in destroying the pagan carvings, demolishing the monumental Maya structures, and using them as stone quarries for the construction of churches and municipal buildings for the cities of New Spain. This use of ancient Maya stones for new building construction was typified at the Maya city of Tho’, now Mérida, the capital of the Yucatán state, and at Izamal, a major Maya religious destination converted by the Spanish to a Christian religious center. The massive Cathedral de San Ildefonso at Mérída and other important structures in these new cities were constructed by Maya masons using their tools of jadeite (Figure C-2).
The lack of interest in the art and architecture of the pre-Columbian cultures was a predictable failing of an uneducated band of soldiers of the king. The Franciscan priests were educated men of God, who should have had some curiosity in the artistic treasures. However, they not only consorted with the conquistadors in the demolition of Maya cities, but went even further in the wanton destruction of Maya books containing the scientific and intellectual legacy of a sophisticated society.
The Franciscan order was granted the spiritual monopoly for the Yucatán by the Spanish Crown. Their goal was to convert the Maya from their indigenous religion to Catholicism. However, the Spanish Inquisition was at its height, and its pitiless and brutal mandates were integrated into the process of converting souls. The Franciscan priests, led by the rabid religious fanatic Bishop Diego de Landa, were sometimes directed to carry out cruel methods to save the souls of the Maya in their care. De Landa would secure his place in history by two acts: the burning of the surviving Maya books at Maní and the writing of the ethnographic masterpiece Relación de las cosas de Yucatán.
The Maya books extant during the 16th century were mostly copies of works originally written during the Classic Period, almost a millennium before the conquest. The books were composed by the Maya literati and were permanent records of the learning, history, and science of the Maya civilization. Those that survived the centuries before the conquest had been protected, copied, and updated by generations of Maya scribes, who were still writing in 1534. The contents of the Maya manuscripts were verified as invaluable records of historical and scientific significance by contemporary Spanish reviewers, including de Landa. Alonso de Zorita wrote in 1540 that he reviewed numerous books that recorded Maya history more than 800 years back and were interpreted for him by elderly Maya, who wrote the script.
The Franciscans considered the Maya books the works of the devil. Untold numbers of books were seized and burned by zealous priests from 1562 to 1697, when the last Maya stronghold fell. The Maya world did not fall easily before the force of Spanish arms; it was a long and fierce fight. The last Maya city fell in 1697, in Tayasal, Guatemala, some 180 years after Hernán Cortés landed at Veracruz, Mexico, and at that time the scribes were still literate. However, after the Maya were defeated, all the Maya books in the defeated city were burned. The city was razed, and its stones used as a quarry to build the churches and buildings of Flores, Guatemala, situated on the site of Tayasal. There is no method of estimating the number of Maya books that were burned in the name of Christianity, but only four Maya books, now known as codices, are known to have survived the zealous priests.
In the summer of 1562, de Landa (Figure 2-1) oversaw the most notorious of incidents related to the burning of Maya books. In the month of May of that year, Franciscan priests at the Yucatán town of Maní discovered that certain Maya had reverted to their traditional religion. The friars instituted methods of the Inquisition that included interrogating suspected heretics using various means of torture. De Landa soon arrived in Maní and took charge of the proceedings, instituting an “episcopal” inquisition. In July, de Landa conducted an auto da fe, or act of faith, during which he burned all the Maya codices he could find as well as 5,000 works of art. He reported that 27 scrolls were burned, but other witnesses stated that 99 times as many were destroyed (Figure 2-2).
Figure 2-1: Bishop Diego de Landa persecuted the Maya, but his writings assisted in breaking the Maya writing code. Image in public domain.
After the incident at Maní, de Landa continued his fanatical religious activities through the destruction of books, and the torture and execution of Maya by burning them alive, hanging, and drowning. Contemporary Spanish observers were troubled by de Landa’s widespread use of torture. The Church also became concerned that de Landa had exceeded his authority by conducting an illegal inquisition. In 1563, Bishop Francisco de Toral sent de Landa back to Spain to stand trial and defend his actions before the Council of the Indies. The pace of the trial went slowly, and nine years passed. De Landa was strongly condemned by the Council of the Indies. Eventually, a committee of doctors was assembled by the Church to judge the actions of de Landa. The committee investigated de Landa’s alleged crimes, determined that he was not guilty, and absolved him of the charges.
During the nine years he spent in Spain defending himself against the charges of his accusers, de Landa wrote the classic work Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Affairs of Yucatán). Despite his overt acts of cruelty to his converts, de Landa had a great interest for the Maya culture. He developed intimate relationships with the Maya, and they were willing to teach him some of the secrets inscribed in their books. He gained their confidence and extensively interviewed learned Maya. He became familiar with the Maya hieroglyphic script, calendars, and other facets of their culture. He obviously kept notes from his interviews and collected other material that was used to write his manuscript. It has been conjectured that he had secreted a Maya codex in his file of source material, which he transported back to Spain on the sea voyage to answer his accusers.
The existing copies of de Landa’s manuscript are considered to be the most important document written that deals with all the aspects of everyday Maya life in the Yucatán. He describes in narrative and hieroglyphic format the 260-day Maya calendar with the names of the days of the month, as well as the hieroglyphic names of the months of the solar year of 360 days. More importantly, this treatise included an explanation of the logic of the Maya writing system. After de Landa was declared innocent, he was elevated to the title of the fourth Bishop of the Yucatán, where he returned to live out his days.
The place of de Landa in history is both famous and infamous; his infamy stems from the destruction of Maya codices, and his fame was earned for Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, which would one day help revolutionize the study of the ancient Maya and assist in breaking the Maya hieroglyphic code. However, fate entered the attempt to solve the riddle of the Maya: De Landa’s manuscript was filed away in the un-catalogued clutter of the Royal Academy in Madrid and was lost for three centuries.
Figure 2-2: Maya codices, such as the Dresden Codex shown here, were written in artistic Maya script. Image in public domain.
During the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, several volumes were published in Europe describing travel adventures in New Spain. The volumes contain erroneous narrative and fanciful depictions of pre-Columbian architecture. The artists who illustrated the works had not traveled to the New World and did not have firsthand experience. Their images reflected Greek, Roman, and French art and architectural influence in the carved details of pre-Columbian cities. Spain’s xenophobia deterred exploration of the colonies, and travel by foreigners to the ports of New Spain was all but forbidden. Entrance to New Spain was totally forbidden to Protestants. The imagery of pre-Colombian art and architecture in European publications were reflections of the minimal descriptions of pre-Columbian cities derived from the letters and accounts of conquistadores. They pursued the concept that pre-Colombian civilizations had European roots.
The Bourbon Dynasty has ruled Spain from 1700 to the present day, with inconsistent results. However, nearly 250 years after the conquest, King Charles III (1759–1788) became ruler of Spain and set out on a policy of enlightenment with administrative reform that reversed the decline of Spain as a colonial power. He had a great interest in learning and science, and found scientific significance in the culture of indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonies. Furthermore, he encouraged exploration of his colonies and exploitation of their natural resources to increase the crown’s revenue. This interest in the culture of New Spain led to the first exploration of ancient Maya cities.
Reports of a large abandoned city, near the village of Palenque, in the providence of Ciudad Real of Chiapas, resulted in the formation of an expedition to the site led by a local priest. Father Ramon Ordoñez de Agilar explored the site in 1773 and submitted a report on his findings to the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala. (Politically, Chiapas was part of Guatemala until it was ceded to Mexico in 1824.) Word of the discovery of a lost city in the rainforest traveled to the Royal Court in Madrid and reached the ears of King Charles III. This discovery attracted his interest and was just the type of scientific issue that held the possibility of treasures while fostering the enlightened atmosphere of seeking scientific truths during his reign. The royal court directed the colonial authorities to conduct an investigation of the ruined city.
In response to the king’s wishes, Joseph Estachería, president of the Royal Audiencia, ordered detailed explorations to be carried out of the Maya classic city of Santo Domingo de Palenque. The initial report in 1784, prepared by José Antonio Calderón, was considered unsatisfactory. In 1785, Estachería dispatched the Royal Architect, Antonio Bernasconi, to Palenque for further investigation. The narratives and illustrations included in the report of the second expedition apparently were seriously flawed and were also considered unsatisfactory. In 1786, Estachería had a stroke of luck and commissioned a Captain of the Dragoons, Don Antonio del Rio, along with a capable Guatemalan artist named Ricardo Almendáriz, to explore the site and prepare a comprehensive report. Through his choice of this talented team, Estachería enhanced the chances of a successful effort. He used the classic combination of a talented writer and an insightful artist to prepare an accurate report of the investigations.
Commissioned by Royal Order of King Charles III, the expedition led by Captain del Rio reached the site on May 3, 1787. The negotiation of the site was difficult due to dense fog and the impenetrable rainforest that covered the ruined buildings. Del Rio commandeered 79 men from the nearby village of Tumbala to clear the site. The survey commenced as the team of workers used axes to fell the trees and uncover the buildings of the ruined city.
During his stay at the site, del Rio encountered a Franciscan priest, Father Thomas de Soza. During conversations, the priest described other ruined cities that he had observed during his travels in the Yucatán. Captain del Rio made note of these other lost cities in his report. Though his report was a clear narrative of his observations of the ruins, his imagination strayed when he compared some of the art figures to Greek prototypes. However, he made a leap of consciousness while describing specific symbology carved into the monuments. He surmised that these symbols were hieroglyphics that had significance in the language of the original natives. His observations correctly recognized the symbols as a written language and they were the work of indigenous peoples.
The result of this expedition to Palenque included a collection of artifacts from the site and an insightful report that contained accurate narrative descriptions of the city and its monuments written by del Rio, accompanied by the drawings prepared by Ricardo Almendáriz. The drawings, however, strayed from accuracy and reflected the classical education of Almendáriz by introducing classical European art and architecture into his illustrations.
The report and artifacts, dated June 24, 1787, were submitted to Estachería. Various copies were made and deposited in the appropriate places in the Madrid and Guatemala City archives. Once more, the xenophobic and isolationist policy of Spanish bureaucrats caused the report to be buried deep in the archives. Captain del Rio’s erudite report represented the first attempt to accurately assess a Maya classic city. It was also the first to suggest that the symbology carved on the ruins represented a written script, to attribute the source of the art and architecture to an indigenous culture, and to report the existence of other lost cities of the Maya.
In 1807, King Charles IV commissioned the most extensive surveys of pre-Columbian cities to date and the last such effort by the Spanish crown. Three expeditions were carried out in response to the king’s desire to know more about the colony of New Spain and its history and natural resources. These expeditions were led by Captain Guillermo Dupaix, who was accompanied by artist Jose Luciano Castañeda. They made an excellent team; Dupaix was a passionate aficionado of pre-Colombian architecture, and Castañeda was the artist for the National Museum in Mexico City.
The expeditions visited Palenque, Mitla, Tula, and Monte Alban. Though Dupaix’s narratives were confined to visual evidence, he opined that the cities were the work of a culture previously unknown to European scholars. His report stated that the ancient cultures produced works endowed with their own genius, their own force of imagination, without the help of foreigners. Castañeda rendered the illustrations of the sites with an accuracy that surpassed that of previous artists. His efforts produced 150 drawings that constituted the most complete visualization of pre-Columbian art and architecture yet assembled. However, Castañeda was also a victim of his classical education, and his works were often distorted and inaccurate by reflecting classic European influence.
Dupaix did not credit the indigenous peoples living in the area of the sites with the construction of the ruined cities. He asserted that the monuments were built by a long-vanished people. As Dupaix completed the report, he lamented that he had ended his exploration with conjecture relative to the source of the ruins. However, his insistence that peoples of independent American origin constructed the ruined cities served as the entrée for the investigations of future explorers. The report was completed in 1808, and was sent to the archives in the National Museum of Mexico City. There it gathered dust until it was reported to have been lost in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. Fortunately, the report was rediscovered in 1828.
The control of Spain over its colonies began to falter in 1810, and by September 1821, the Spanish crown admitted defeat and, with the signing of the Treaty of Cordoba, recognized Mexico as an independent nation. The collapse of the Spanish rule opened the way for exploration of the country, investigation of its ruins, and the publishing of pre-Colombian scholarship. In 1822, nearly 40 years after the completion of Captain del Rio’s report, a copy of the report was secreted away from the royal archives in Guatemala City and found its way to British publisher Henry Berthoud. Berthoud claimed that the report was not stolen from Guatemala, but was rescued from the oblivion of the archives and had been legitimately secured. He published the report in 1822 under the title “Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City.” Captain del Rio’s report was translated into English and was largely re-written, the contents barely resembling the original document. The volume also included a fanciful essay by Doctor Paul Felix Cabrera, of Guatemala, who proposed that America’s first colonists were either from Mount Hebron or Mount Olympus. The volume contained 17 engraved plates, which were taken from Almendáriz’s illustrations in the original report. It is of note that nine of the engravings bear the initials “JFW” and were prepared by the flamboyant Jean Frederick Waldeck. This volume, with its narrative and engravings, constitutes the first published illustrations of Maya art and the inscriptions carved into their monumental buildings.
In 1830, fate took a hand in the final disposition of the Dupaix report. This report reached Europe by a route of devious means. The manuscript was spirited away from the archives of the National Museum of Mexico and found its way into the Parisian library of Frenchman Francois Latour-Allard. The manuscript then found its way into the collection of Englishman Edward King, Lord Kingsborough. Lord Kingsborough included all the then-known reports in his nine-volume work entitled Antiquities of Mexico. The series appeared between 1830 and 1848, and include works relating to ancient Mexico. This series published, among other matters, all known works relating to pre-Columbian art and architecture. The works included the Maya Dresden Codex, the Aztec Mendoza and Telleriano-Remensis codices, the Aztec Florentine Codex prepared under 16th-century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun, selections from Humboldt’s Picturesque Atlas, and scholarly works by Kingsborough and other intellectuals. The scholarly chapters in Kingsborough’s volumes supported his belief that ancient Mexican civilization had been founded by the lost tribes of Israel.
Jean Frederick Waldeck, the artist who engraved some of the plates in Berthoud’s 1922 volume, traveled to Mexico in 1825. Waldeck, who claimed to be a count, spent nine years working in Mexico City as a hydraulic engineer before traveling south to the Yucatán, where he sketched and painted the ruins of Maya classic cities. He found his was to Palenque, where he lived in the ruined structures from May 1832 to July 1833. The building he used as his place of habitation is still known as the “Temple of the Count.” He then traveled to the ancient city of Uxmal in 1834, producing architectural reconstructions of the site. He returned to Paris and began work on the production of lithographs developed from his renderings of the Maya sites. In 1838, he published Voyage Pittoresque et Archéologique dans la Province d’Yucatan. Illustrations in this book indicate the Eurocentric spin that Waldeck infused in his interpretations of Maya art. His paintings of Uxmal reflect a pronounced Egyptian style. The most skewed prejudices are in his renditions of hieroglyphics, which depicted elephants in his illustrations of Maya monuments. The illustrations in his book, though flawed, provided the first eye-witness accounts of classic Maya ruins since Mexico’s independence.
The greatest compilation of Maya knowledge was set down in the thousands of Maya books destroyed by the zealous Spanish conquistadors. Only four examples of these marvelous works are known to survive today. These few examples of a once-voluminous library were the key to the decipherment of the Maya script and the unveiling of the secrets of the Maya (Figure 2-2).
A single Maya book, the Dresden Codex, was known to survive in European libraries during the mid-19th century. The origin of this singular artifact is clouded in the mist of time, though it may have been a part of the treasure sent back to Spain by conquistadors. In 1519, before his conquest of Mexico, Hernán Cortés and his bloodthirsty band were sacking the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near the present-day city of Vera Cruz. They were collecting loot from the cities of Gulf Coast Maya. While ransacking the houses of the local inhabitants, it was reported that the Spanish encountered innumerable books. Some samples were collected for their artistic value, along with other looted valuables and captives. Their trove included valuables collected from local raids plus bribes paid to Cortés by the Aztec emperor. Part of the booty, the “royal fifth,” was the 20 percent to be paid to the Spanish royal court. Reports from Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’s private secretary, indicated that the royal fifth included some books, folded like cloth, which contained figures like the Mexicans (Aztecs) use for letters. These books were of little value to the cut-throat conquistadors, who did not value them because they did not understand them.
The ship transporting the royal fifth, including captives from the raids, treasure, and the books, reached Spain safely. In a letter, Giovanni Ruffo da Forli, Papal Nunico at the Spanish court who had inspected the treasure, described his memories of the books. He stated that there were some paintings, folded and joined in the form of a book, and that in these were figures and signs in the form of Arabic or Egyptian letters. Italian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, present at the review, described the books as being made of the inner bark of a tree, the pages coated with plaster and the cover made of wooden boards. He described the writing as characters written in a line and that they greatly resembled Egyptian forms.
One of the passengers on the treasure ship with the royal fifth was Francisco de Montejo, the future governor of the Yucatán, who was quite knowledgeable about the Maya. He had gained his knowledge from Gerómino de Aguilar, a Spaniard held captive by a Maya chief for eight years. Through Aguilar, Montejo knew of the existence of Maya books and their writing capabilities. Peter Martyr interviewed Montejo and learned of the contents of Maya books. Martyr reported that the contents of the books included descriptions of laws, sacrifices, ceremonies, rites, astronomical notations, and mathematical computations. There can be no doubt that the “works of art” that fascinated the European men of learning were Maya codices.
The fate of the Maya books reaching Spain as part of the royal fifth is unknown. An exception could be the invaluable Dresden Codex. In 1739, the Royal Library of Saxony in Dresden purchased a unique book from a private collection in Vienna. This book was not catalogued and went unnoticed until 1796, when it surfaced in a most unlikely place. That year a treatise was published in Leipzig relating to the art of interior design. The five-volume work was entitled Darstellung und Geschichte des Geschmacks der vorzÜglichsten VÖlker (Depiction and History of the Taste of Superior Peoples) by Joseph Friedrich, Baron von Racknitz. The volumes included a plate showing a room decorated with icons from the Dresden Codex. However, though this was the first publication of Maya script in print, the contents of this volume, no doubt, escaped the study of scholars.
Alexander von Humboldt, the famous German explorer, made significant studies in American geology, meteorology, and natural history, and published an atlas in 1810. The volume entitled Vues de Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de L’Amérique (Views of the Mountain Ranges and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas). This work includes a plate showing five pages from the Dresden Codex in intricate detail. This was the first publication of a portion of a Maya codex and the first accurate representation of a Maya hieroglyphic text.
At the mid-point of the 19th century, there were no researchers in the Americas attempting to decipher the Maya script. Extensive research into the Maya civilization was almost impossible due to the lack of access to the published works on the topic. All published works on the Maya were printed in Europe, in limited numbers with a costly price tag. They consisted of multiple volumes printed in elephant folio format, each weighing 20 to 40 pounds and measuring 30 inches × 24 inches (77 cm × 60 cm). Furthermore, they cost thousands of dollars per set, winding up in the collections of a few erudite European collectors. The publications were rare in Europe and all but unknown to scholars in America. Experts have determined that a single set of these volumes may have found its way to the United States by 1843, when serious exploration of Maya cities began to take shape.
The works containing invaluable knowledge of the Maya had a way of going missing in archives and libraries; the invaluable works relating to Maya life during the conquest by Bishop Diego de Landa were lost in the Madrid archives and not recovered for 300 years. The effort to destroy Maya books was complete, with the exception of four Maya codices that are known to survive. In the mid-19th century the Dresden Codex had not been recognized for the information on Maya script that it contained. The other three codices were not discovered until the 19th and 20th centuries. The Paris Codex was found in the Paris National Library in 1859, the Madrid Codex was uncovered in 1866 in Madrid, and the Grolier Codex was discovered in New York in 1976 and was returned to Mexico. The wonder of it all is that four survived. Could it be that the world’s great libraries, including the Vatican Library, have other codices in their vaults?
During the middle of the 19th century, Spain’s colonies in the New World won their independence. Gone was the xenophobic policy of New Spain. The Maya homeland in Mexico and Central America was opened to explorers and scholars of antiquity.
On October 3, 1839, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood boarded a ship in New York harbor and set sail for the Bay of Honduras. Little did this talented pair know how much this adventure would change their lives and result in the rewriting of world history.
When their ship set sail for the tropics, 34-year-old John Lloyd Stephens, a New York City attorney, and 40-year-old Frederick Catherwood, a British architect, were enthralled with their mission. The pair had met in England four years earlier and established a friendship based on mutual interests in ancient art and architecture. Both men had had extensive experience in the study of classic European and Egyptian archaeology. They had visited ruins of the ancient world, recording descriptions and illustrations of classic archaeological sites. Stephens was a successful travel writer. He had traveled the old world and had written two popular travel books: Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petria, and the Holy Land (1837) and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838). The books were written in a style that provided a chatty narrative of everyday incidents that he encountered in his travels (Figure 2-3). Catherwood was a gifted artist with extensive archaeological experience in the Mediterranean and the Near East. He had trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and, following his formal training, became a traveling illustrator. Catherwood traveled extensively in Greece, Egypt, Italy, and the Near East, preparing illustrations of the ancient monuments from classic civilizations.
Stephens had learned of possible lost cities in the Yucatán and Central America from a book seller in New York and persuaded Catherwood to accompany him in the exploration of the abandoned Maya cities to record the sites with his accurate illustrations. Stephens had secured a diplomatic passport from President Martin Van Buren as the U.S. Representative to the Central American Federation. Stephens took great advantage of his diplomatic status in traveling throughout the region exploring the Classic Maya cities. The result of this collaboration was the 1841 publication, in two volumes, of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, followed by additional discoveries of Maya cities in the two-volume work Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, published in 1843.
Figure 2-3: John Lloyd Stephens wrote a series of books that revealed the Maya civilization and changed world history. Wikimedia Commons.
The explorations of the Maya cities were carried out methodically and recorded with meticulous detail. Stephens and Catherwood had gained extensive experience observing Egyptian monuments and their carved hieroglyphics. This experience with similar ancient iconography provided a substantial background for their observations, narratives, and illustrations of Maya art and architecture.
The technology of the camera was in its infancy during this period, and the team had the use of a daguerreotype camera on their second journey. This type of camera could produce an image, but the technique of reproduction of photography would not be mastered for several years in the future. To capture the complex details of Maya art, Catherwood combined his natural talent for drawing with the use of a camera lucida. This device projected the image of a monument directly onto sheets of sectioned graph paper. Images could be accurately drawn in the correct proportion and perspective. His illustrations provided exquisite images that were reproduced as engravings in the two-volume sets (Figure 2-4 and Figure 2-5). The camera lucida images produced an exponential increase in quality when compared with any method of illustration that had previously been published depicting the monuments and structures of the classic Maya.
Figure 2-4: Frederick Catherwood traveled with John Lloyd Stephens and produced accurate illustrations of Maya art and architecture. Wikimedia Commons.
Stephens’s narrative of the art and architecture of the monuments in the classic cities, and the daily incidents of the adventure are well organized and clearly written. Stephens was familiar with the recent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by the French scholar Jean François Champollion, who had decoded the Rosetta Stone. Stephens was convinced that the carved inscriptions on the monuments were a hieroglyphic script that described the historical records of the civilization that had constructed the cities. This leap of consciousness was a direct link derived from to his knowledge of the writing systems of ancient civilizations that he had observed in the ancient cities of the Old World. Stephens stated, in Volume One of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, “One thing I believe, that its history is graven on its monuments. No Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of the inquiring mind. Who will read them?” Stephens’s concept was well ahead of his time; however, his conception of the inscriptions of the script was to be criticized as erroneous by Mayanists for decades into the future. However, history and hard work by epigraphers would prove him to be correct.
Previous European volumes on the Maya had cost thousands of dollars each. In 1841, Stephens’s two-volume sets sold for five dollars and were affordable to the general American reading public. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán sold 20,000 copies in the first three months of publication. Stephens’s clever narrative and the precise engravings by Catherwood produced works that became best-sellers throughout the world. In 1843, the pair published a second two-volume set relating to the Maya, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán. The second set, equally popular as the first, related to their exploration of Maya sites in the Yucatán. Though not covering the distances reflected in their first effort in Maya exploration, the second volumes explored a greater number of abandoned cities. These volumes are masterpieces of accurate visual and narrative descriptions of Maya cities (Figure 2-6).
Stephens’s conclusions included his theories of the substance and age of the Classic Maya cities. Unlike European scholars, Stephens hypothesized that the ruins were of recent origin and had not been constructed by travelers from ancient Mediterranean cultures. Furthermore, he concluded that the inscriptions carved on the monuments constituted a writing system and recognized that the writing at different sites was apparently of the same language. He further concluded that the script carved on the monuments was the same writing system as illustrated in the Dresden Codex. These popular books resulted in the rewriting of the history of the Americas and opened the Maya civilization to exploration and multiple fields of study. Today, these books are as popular with aficionados of Maya archaeology as they were in the 19th century.
Figure 2-5: View of El Castillo at Chichen Itza by Frederick Catherwood, the first images the world saw of the Maya civilization. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 2-6: The Maya arch at Labná by Frederick Catherwood. Wikimedia Commons.
Stephens and Catherwood never returned to the Yucatán after the success of their books. However, their final collaboration made another significant impact on American life and history. Stephens had grown wealthy from the sale of his books. In the late 1840s, he helped fund the construction of the famous Panama Railroad, and Catherwood joined the effort as the civil engineer for the design and construction of the roadway line. The Panama Railroad transported gold prospectors from the east coast of Panama across the isthmus on their way to the gold fields of California. The railroad was a success and is still operating today. However, as the Trans-Isthmus project was completed, tragedy struck both players. Stephens was injured in Panama and died in New York City in October 1852. Shortly afterward, Catherwood followed him to the grave in 1854. While returning on the steamship Arctic to New York from England, the ship was struck by a French freighter. He went down at sea off the coast of Labrador, with many of his drawings and daguerreotypes.
After the Mexican-American War in 1848, travel in Mexico became hazardous. The rate of exploration was reduced by the civil strife, but some adventurers were able to travel with the protection of small armies. The technology of the camera had improved, along with the ability to record photo prints, and the Yucatán became a hunting ground for adventurous explorers traversing the rainforest seeking new finds. They were equipped with the new type of camera to record their discoveries. The explorers used photographic images and narrative descriptions of their discoveries. Though the corpus of descriptions and imagery of the ruins grew, there were few attempts to decipher the script and disclose the secrets of the Maya, including those of Constantine Rafinesque and James McCulloh.
Traveling in Mexico from 1857 to 1861, French adventurer Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay used the new invention of reproducible photography and an efficient method of plaster casting using lightweight molds to produce three-dimensional copies of Maya art. The two innovations created a tremendous visual impact on the recording and dissemination of Maya art. In 1862, Charnay published his findings in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s volume Cités et Ruins Américaines (American Cities and Ruins). He patterned his work after that of Stephens, employing a running narrative with clear photographic images. He returned to Mexico from 1880 to 1883 to visit the ruined cities, and published Les Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde (The Ancient Cities of the New World) in 1887. The development of the photogravure printing process had enhanced the reproduction of photography. This allowed his published works to be available to the same wide public readership as the works of John Lloyd Stephens. The lost cities of the Maya became popular again.
Born near London in 1850 to a wealthy engineering family, Alfred Percival Maudslay led a life of scholarship and adventure, and left a significant mark as a leader in Maya archaeology. Maudslay attended Cambridge University and then joined the diplomatic service. He served as a British diplomat in the South Pacific, where he was involved in subduing rebellious tribes in Fiji. After that posting, he was appointed British Consul to Tonga and Samoa. He resigned the British Diplomatic Corps and traveled to Mexico to begin the major archaeological work that is his legacy. He was first drawn to the ruins of the Maya cities by reading the works of John Lloyd Stephens. Maudslay carried out seven explorations in Mexico and Central America. During his first trip in 1881, he set a goal of providing a complete and accurate record of the architecture, art, and inscriptions of specific Classic Maya cities, including Chichen Itza, Copán, Palenque, Quiriguá, and the river city of Yaxchilan. Maudslay used the newly developed wet plate photographic process and made paper-mâché casts of the monuments. The work at the sites was carried out under conditions of great hardship, and the effort of transporting the voluminous results of his works back to London was a considerable task.
Maudslay retained an artist, Annie Hunter, to prepare lithographic plates of the photographs and casts he had made of the monuments and inscriptions of the Maya ruins. His work was the first to depict accurate, large-scale details of Maya script. Maudslay published his work as an appendix to the multi-volume work Biologia Centrali-Americana (Central American Biology). Previously, the only available works for the monuments were the prejudiced and amateurish illustrations of Almendáriz and Waldeck. For the first time, Maya epigraphers had concise and accurate representations of Maya hieroglyphics to study and decipher. The total of Maudslay’s work was available by 1902. Maudslay moved back to London in 1907, and became the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He died in 1931 and is buried in Hereford Cathedral.
Augustus Le Plongeon was a highly eccentric amateur archaeologist of the late 19th century. Camera technology and lightweight casting techniques had made further advances by his time, and Le Plongeon carried out studies, made molds of art and architecture, and took innovative photographs at Palenque and Chichen Itza. He published several works from 1880 to 1896. Although his published works were failures with the public and with critics, the quality of his molds and photographs was unparalleled by 19th-century standards. He pioneered concise, close-up photography, and established the use of panoramic photography and photography from elevated vantage points. He added to the growing corpus of visual and narrative information on the Maya. Le Plongeon sold his large collection of casts to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. The molds were never used for making replicas and met the destiny of other Maya artifacts: they have disappeared from the museum, and their fate is unknown.
Teobert Maler was born in Rome in 1842 to German diplomat parents, and studied architecture and engineering in Vienna. He took a job as an architect in Vienna. Anxious to see the world, he traveled to Mexico as a soldier in Emperor Maximilian’s army during the French Intervention in Mexico (1862–1867). He quickly rose from private to captain, but then his life took a turn when Mexico won the war. Teobert surrendered his troops to the Mexican Army. Rather than be deported as an exile, he elected to stay in Mexico and became a Mexican citizen. Teobert became Teoberto.
In 1876, he visited Palenque and fell in love with the Maya. He learned the Maya language and set up a photo studio in Ticul, a small town in the Yucatán. Using a large format camera and the wet plate process, Teobert Maler made a huge contribution to the detailed records available to Mayanist scholars. Maler recorded the fine details on monuments at a wide range of Maya sites. He had a unique and clever system of revealing undiscovered sites. He was a pioneer in using chicleros to locate unknown Maya sites buried deep within the rainforest. These wide-ranging chicleros extracted chicle, the basic ingredient in chewing gum, from the chico zapote tree scattered throughout the rainforest. Maler offered a reward to the chicleros if they detected an undiscovered site. This yielded a world of lost cities that went undiscovered by Stephens, Catherwood, and Maudslay. Maler explored a great number of sites and recorded the carvings on the monuments in significant detail. This fine detail added greatly to the graphic corpus of the Maya monuments and, with the published codices, formed the basis for the initial partial decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphics.
Maler’s voluminous work was published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University until 1912 and later published posthumously in the 1970s and 1990s. In his later years, Teoberto lived a quiet life at his home in Mérida. His money gone, he survived by selling photos to tourists and teaching young archaeologists. He died in Mérida in 1917 at, age 75.
Along with the graphic and narrative images produced by Stephens, Catherwood, Maudslay, Maler, and other recorded collections, the last half of the 19th century saw the discovery and publishing of the lost works produced by Maya scribes, as well the lost works of Bishop Diego de Landa. A treasure trove of original material vital to the decipherment effort was discovered and published during this period.
In 1861, the Popol Vuh, considered to be the greatest work in Native American literature, was discovered by Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg in a private collection in Guatemala City. Brasseur possessed an amazing trait as an archival “bird dog” that enabled him to sniff out and uncover lost works of the Maya. In 1862, he unearthed the manuscript of de Landa in the Royal Academy of Madrid. The precious work had lain un-catalogued for 300 years until Brasseur discovered the document in a dusty corner of the archives. His astonishing skills of detection continued in 1866. During a visit to Madrid, Brasseur was shown a Maya book, by a descendent of Hernán Cortés. The document was considered to be a family keepsake. Brasseur recognized the work as a Maya codex. Then in 1875, another fragment of a codex turned up. Research by Leon de Rosney, the French orientalist who discovered the Paris Codex, indicated that the two Madrid finds were part of the same Codex. Together they constitute the largest known Maya book and are known as the Madrid Codex. The fourth known Maya codex, the Grolier, was not discovered until the 1976.
With the wealth of new and rediscovered information, why did decipherment of the Maya script not proceed? Why didn’t some modern Champollion of Rosetta Stone fame set up shop and decipher the code with an early Enigma machine? Mayanist Michael Coe correctly hypothesized that the decipherment was hampered by the lack of linguistic training and clarity of vision in early Mayanists, traits that enabled the clever Jean François Champollion to make the leap of consciousness that achieved his monumental breakthrough of deciphering the Rosetta Stone.
Aside from Rafinesque and McCulloh, the first attempts at decipherment that bore fruit were carried out by newspaperman Joseph T. Goodman. Goodman was the classic “crossover” Mayanist, having come from a non-archeological background. Goodman was owner and editor of the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada Territory, the site of the fabulous gold strike known as the Comstock Lode. Goodman became rich on his Comstock Lode investments. Tiring of the desert dust, he moved west to San Francisco, where he took a seat on the Pacific Stock Exchange and became managing editor of the San Francisco Post. He later retired to his raisin ranch and began his Maya studies in the 1880s. Goodman relied on the recordings of Maudslay and Dr. Gustavus Eisen to carry out analysis and decipherment of the Maya Long Count calendar. Goodman announced in the 1897 edition of Biologica Centrali-Americana that he had deciphered the Maya calendar. Controversy immediately raged over the ability of a California raisin grower to achieve such a discovery, but history has proved him to be correct. The calendar tables he published in Biologia Centrali-Americana are still in use by scholars calculating Long Count dates. Furthermore, Goodman discovered the “head variants,” mathematical hieroglyphs that can be substituted for the bar and dot dates in Long Count dates. However, his most significant discovery, announced in 1905, was the correlation between the Maya Long Count calendar and our present-day Julian calendar. With this discovery of correlated dating, the dates on Maya monuments could be deciphered with accuracy and identified with the time period that was concurrent with the history of that site. Goodman’s amazing discovery was scorned by Maya scholars and lay forgotten until 1926, when Juan Martinez Hernandez recovered it and gave proof of its correctness.
The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics was impeded for nearly a half century by professional jealousy and potential for reprobation by archaeologist Eric Thompson. Eric Thompson dominated Maya studies during the mid-20th century with his overbearing personality, intellectual influence, and force of will. He used his knowledge of Maya calendrics in 1915 to gain a position with the Carnegie Institution in the excavations at Chichen Itza, where his talents were wasted as a field archaeologist. In 1926, he separated himself from the Carnegie Institution and accepted a position with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Thompson attacked Maya scholars who developed concepts that did not agree with his case for Maya script being solely calendric. However, Thompson was an efficient iconographer and developed accurate insights into Maya religion and mythology. His monumental work, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, was not a primer for Maya decipherment but constituted an impediment that retarded the Maya script for a generation of Maya scholars. Young Mayanists were cowed into subscribing to Thompson’s ideas by his imperial arrogance and vicious criticism.
Thompson’s willful determination to misguide Maya scholars has resulted in the tendency of today’s younger Maya scholars to dismiss Thompson’s contributions to the field. It is true that Thompson was wrong about the intent and characteristics of Maya hieroglyphic writing. However, Thompson made certain momentous discoveries in deciphering the Maya glyphs.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff was born in 1909 in Tomsk, Russian Empire. Her father, a chemist, was requested by the tsar to oversee the production of munitions for World War I. His duties involved travel to the United States, and his family were visiting Philadelphia in 1915 when the Russian Revolution changed the character of Mother Russia. The stateless family made Philadelphia their home. Proskouriakoff graduated from Penn State University in 1930 with a degree in architecture. Fate destined that the young architect would not be bound into the peonage of an architectural office but assumed a position as an archaeological artist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Proskouriakoff’s unique talents in detailing archaeological artifacts attracted the attention of Linton Satterthwaite, the director of the museum’s investigation at the Classic Maya city of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, sited along the shore of the mighty Usumacinta River. She toiled at Piedras Negras from 1934 to 1938. Her job was to produce architectural restoration drawings of Structure P-7 and perspective reconstruction drawings of the acropolis as it might have appeared during the height of power of Piedras Negras. Proskouriakoff’s excellent renderings were admired by the Carnegie Institution. She was retained as a Carnegie employee with a mission to prepare architectural reconstructions of significant classic Maya sites.
In 1950, during the time of the “dictatorship” of Eric Thompson, Proskouriakoff discovered a pattern of dates by using comparative observations and logical structural interpretation of glyphs during her work on the monuments at Piedras Negras. She discovered that the inscriptions carved on the stele at Piedras Negras described the history of the rulers and the accomplishments of the city. The glyphs did not relate to astronomy, religion, or similar sacrosanct subjects dictated to be the sole subjects of Maya script by Thompson, though he later agreed with her. The carved figures on the stele and lintels were mortal men and women who had ruled the city. They were not gods, priests, or mythological figures, but represented real people who had led their lives at Piedras Negras. The inscriptions described the history of the rulers of the city-state. Michael Coe, in his book, Breaking the Maya Code, stated that because “this extraordinary woman cut the Gordian Knot of Maya epigraphy...the Maya had become real human beings.” They had actual names with personalities, achievements, and lifestyles.
Proskouriakoff published a paper in American Antiquity relating her discovery of the real content of Maya inscriptions written in stone. Her logic was exactly right when she stated, “In retrospect, the idea that Maya texts record history, naming their rulers or lords of the towns, seems so natural that it is strange that it has not been thoroughly explored before.” She is truly a giant in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics and a perceptive artist in the reconstruction of Maya structures. Her ashes are buried among the ruins of Piedras Negras on the banks of the Usumacinta River.
The academic world was blindsided when the cracking of the Maya code was announced from isolation behind the Iron Curtain. The brilliant work of decipherment was carried out at a university, during the height of the Cold War, deep in the heart of Russia. The university is located 10,000 miles from the tropical rainforest of the Yucatán.
The initial phase of the most brilliant breakthrough in Maya decipherment and the greatest linguistic achievement since the translation of the Rosetta Stone did not come to pass in the hallowed halls of a great museum or in the ivory towers of an Ivy League university, but started in the war-torn streets of Berlin. In May 1945, the Soviet Army had overrun the city and was sacking the capital of the Third Reich. On that night, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, a young Russian artillery spotter, found himself in front of the Prussian National Library, which was being pillaged by the victorious Red Army. That fiery night in front of the library, Knorosov encountered his comrades throwing thousands of rare books into the burning pyre. It was fate that guided his hand to a book lying at the edge of the conflagration. He snagged the book from the inferno and slipped into the darkness. The book that Knorosov collected was a rare 1933 publication containing facsimiles of the Paris, Dresden, and Madrid Codices written by Antonio and Carlos Villacorta. Yuri was a student in ancient languages at Moscow State University when the war interrupted his studies. He knew that the book was unique. He secured his find in his knapsack and transported his trophy back to Russia. This serendipitous retrieval of a precious book changed the course of Maya scholarship.
In autumn 1945, the 23-year-old Knorosov returned to his studies of ancient writing systems at Moscow State University. His main interest was in Egyptology, but he was also interested in the writing systems of China and ancient India, the Arabic language, and Japanese literature. His advisors recommended that he concentrate on Egyptology. However, motivated by the contents of the book that he had recovered in Berlin, Knorosov pursued his interest in archaeology, ethnology, and the decipherment of the Maya script. Sergi Alekandrovich Tokarev, his professor, encouraged Knorosov to crack the Maya writing system, challenging him with an enticing question: If you believe that any writing system produced by humans can be read by humans, why don’t you try to decipher the Maya system?
Knorosov rose to the challenge. He taught himself Spanish in order to undertake a translation of de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán for his research into the decipherment of Maya glyphs. He used the translation and the copies of codices to work on the decipherment of the Maya script. This work became his doctoral dissertation. He completed his studies at Moscow University and then moved to Leningrad, where he assumed a research post in the Institute of Ethnology.
Knorosov, a scholar in various ancient written scripts, was well prepared to decipher the Maya code. His knowledge of the structure and composition of early historic scripts combined with his brilliant mind enabled Knorosov to recognize the stages and evolution that are mutual developments in all early scripts. He categorized the comparative scripts as hieroglyphic and identified the Maya writing as being in this category. In these systems, he identified syllables. He recognized that the phonetic meaning of de Landa’s signs were exactly as de Landa had transcribed in his manuscript. He also recognized that glyphs can sometimes be phonetic or other times can represent a morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning in a language). Knorosov also understood that the order of writing script may be inverted for use in calligraphy as well as other more complex methods to reduce ambiguity in the reading of the scripts. He used the scientific method to establish a logical methodology for decipherment.
Knorosov’s brilliant work became the most significant effort in deciphering the Maya script. In 1952, when he published the paper “Ancient Writing of Central America,” he presented the argument that Bishop de Landa’s manuscript was made of syllabic rather than alphabetic symbols. He further improved his decipherment techniques in his 1963 monograph “The Writing of the Maya Indians” and translation of Maya manuscripts. In 1975, he published “Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts.” Knorosov’s methodologies would lead the way to full decipherment. De Landa’s work had turned out to be his Rosetta Stone.
Eric Thompson attacked Knorosov with vigor starting in 1953, claiming, among other things, that the Russian claim to decipherment should be placed with other Soviet boasts of the era, including the invention of the game of baseball, the airplane, and other “firsts.” The great Mayanist Thompson had decreed that Knorosov’s decipherment was another hoax by the Iron Curtain masters of propaganda.
In 1955, archaeologist Michael Coe came upon an unauthorized Spanish translation of Knorosov’s 1952 seminal work in a bookstore in Mérida, Mexico. This was the first review by a Western scholar of the groundbreaking work. Knorosov’s doctoral thesis on de Landa’s work was published in Russian in 1955. Sophie Coe, Michael’s wife, was bilingual in English and Russian; she translated a new paper by Knorosov in 1958, assuring a wide audience of Mayanists. The 1958 translation describing Knorosov’s methods and decipherments appeared in American Antiquity. Michael Coe states in his seminal book, Breaking the Maya Code, that Thompson was completely off track and Knorosov was right on the point. The decipherment of Maya script accelerated after Knorosov’s 1963 work “The Writing of the Maya Indians,” with the real lift-off taking place after Thompson’s death in 1975; within four years the tide for acceptance of Knorosov’s work had turned and as many as 135 participants attended a conference on Maya hieroglyphic writing in Albany, New York.
In the annals of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment, the contributions of a group of like-minded scholars including archaeologists, epigraphers, linguists, and crossover experts are difficult to separate. The group contributed to the process of interpreting the script and subsequent revelation of the history, sciences, and technology of the ancient Maya.
Further progress in the decipherment accelerated exponentially during the 1960s and 1970s, with a multitude of methodologies, including pattern analysis, de Landa’s “alphabet,” and Knorosov’s breakthrough. Breakthroughs in reading the Maya script were advanced by a series of conferences that assembled talented epigraphers and Mayanists. These conferences, including the Palenque Round Table and the Texas Maya Meetings, combined with a new breed of “young Turks” and “born-again” veterans, created unique and advanced breakthroughs in unveiling the secrets of the Maya. These creative epigraphers included Michael Coe, Ian Graham, Nikolai Grube, Norman Hammond, Peter Matthews, Stephen Houston, Linda Schele, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. Decipherment had achieved an international status with major contributions from Maya scholars, many of them quite young, originating from such places as Canada, Germany, France, and Guatemala. Maya epigraphers can now read 85 percent of the glyphs in the codices, inscriptions, and painted vases.
As explorers and archaeologists located the remnants of this intellectual culture and reported the glory of the art and architecture of the cities and their scientific accomplishments, readers across the globe became intrigued by the Maya. During the past century, universities, museums, foundations, and governments have cleared the sites and consolidated the monumental structures to permit a view of the ancient Maya cities. Tourists and aficionados of Maya culture have flocked to the sites to gaze in awe at the skyscraping pyramids and ornate sculptures constructed by ancient artisans. The number of international visitors now counts in the tens of millions each year paying homage to the Maya. This popularity has earned the pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, Mexico, the title of one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.
