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)
That sort of generalization lets the monsters off easy and pointlessly demonizes everyone. Throwing “we” around like that only makes excuses for the worst people around.
You know, I actually think it’s a bit more myopic than that? There have been many despicable warlords in history and even they weren’t all the same.
The standard explanation for the spanish burning the mesoamerican canons is that, in so doing, they were erasing a people’s identity and memory. It would be about power and empire building. Truth be told, the spanish also have a record of ensuring loyalty and compliance of the exploited peasantry by also *co-opting * local religious traditions. So even they could have just… not burned all of those texts. Hell, there are even Church arguments not to do so because a deeper knowledge of the ‘pagan traditions’ would be in the interest of the colonizing faith.
It’s not a human thing. It’s a historical circumstances thing.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Christianity became the dominant religion in a lot of other
regions by very different means, such as persuading kings to convert or outright co-opting local traditions, for example.
But that’s just the thing, that co-optation of local traditions I mentioned? It happened in Yucatán as well! That sort of thing happened everywhere in the portuguese and spanish empires where state power was too far for the comfort of local landlords. This being the early modern state, we are talking about almost across the whole territory. This makes a lot of sense because many of those same landlords were themselves former native elites.
The spanish themselves, in this instance, had a choice to make and they made it.
That’s a very good point of clarification: that really was a choice and “human nature” platitudes are deeply unserious indeed.
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Well this is measurably different. The Mongols sacked Baghdad but within two years of the sack the libraries were back open. Neither Arabic nor Persian culture was intentionally suppressed, their languages and great works did not disappear, and the sacking of a city and its destruction is rather dissimilar to an intentional destruction of all cultural artifacts and memory of an entire people. Same with the Library of Alexandria; the works of the Greeks are still extant, there was no sustained effort to destroy and bury ancient knowledge, etc. It’s just a siege. What the Spanish did in Mexico is leagues worse.
well some important volumes probably perished in Bagdad and Alexandria which we only know from excerpts and references. but whether those wouldve made it to present day without those events is speculation
Oh absolutely we lost things. For instance, I really wish more of Euripides plays were extant (specifically Bellerophon, would love to read that one based on the fragments we do have), and we know that the Library of Alexandria had copies (there’s a famous story, perhaps apocryphal, that the librarian had all of Euripides’ manuscripts sent from Athens, meticulously copied and disseminated across the Hellenic world), and they probably burned. But plenty of others had copies too, and none of those have survived to the present. But it is different in that we often know what we lost. The Little Iliad, for example, or Sappho’s poetry. And we do have a mass amount of stuff we didn’t lose. In the case of the Maya, we lost everything. We have only a tiny idea of what texts were out there. The texts we do have a fragments, none complete. Hell we only decoded Mayan glyphs in the mid 20th century!
Bad people did bad things throughout history for a number of bad reasons and Christianity was only sometimes involved, even in pretense. Not sure what you’re getting at.