Only 4 Texts Remain from the Maya Civilization After Thousands Were Destroyed
Despite the fact that we are not very far removed from their heyday, we know very little about Maya civilization.
And it’s not because the Maya weren’t into recording their history.
The Maya were prolific writers and actually evolved from using scrolls to a form of folded paper called the codex right around the same time as the Romans, though each appears to be independent of the other.
[…]
Maya glyphs and the records of the Spanish conquistadors themselves attest to thousands of these codices existing by the time the two cultures met in the 16th century.
But, due to their being destroyed by priests, conquistadors, ship raiders, and even time and mold, only about 22 codices, of which only four have Maya origin, exist today.
None of them are complete, and none have their original covers.
[…]
And you might have noticed that the oldest one only goes back to 200-300 years before the Spanish conquest.
We know that the codices went back at least 800 years prior to that, so we’re essentially looking at the tip of a fingernail and trying to guess what the hand looked like.
And that’s how the soul of a culture gets erased from history…
See also: Burning the Maya Books: The 1562 Tragedy at Mani
The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. (Wikipedia)
I haven’t done a deep dive on it but from my understanding:
It has been greatly exaggerated
It is framed in a very propagandistic way and it could just as easily be said that during the Spanish Inquisition there was the widespread superstitious practice of ritually torturing and executing people as human sacrifices to their God, if you wanted to use that same sort of framing
Like always, this is used to divert attention away from the brutality of the settler-colonists and as a justification (“Well they were doing it too!!”/“We had to be brutal or otherwise they would have slaughtered us all!!”) This trope inevitably gets brought up with regards to native American peoples participating in slavery or scalping or acts of retribution and so on.
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