New Volume Traces the Forgotten History of the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas

After the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, the Maya people witnessed the destruction of their written language.

As it was the only autochthonous script of the Americas to represent speech, this represented a loss of crucial ancient scholarship. Only three books were thought to have survived—until the Códice Maya de México emerged. Discovered under mysterious circumstances, the ‘fourth’ Maya codex is now known to be the oldest surviving text of the Americas. Painted by a single artist, the book chronicles the movements of the planet Venus across the sky and would have served as the guidebook of a community’s spiritual leader.

Códice Maya de México: Understanding the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas (Getty Research Institute/J. Paul Getty Museum, $24.95) is a text that will transform our understanding of ancient Maya peoples. Featuring new research, this volume takes a close look at its discovery, interpretation, and scientific authentication. A full-color facsimile of the codex and an easy-to-follow page-by-page guide broaden the accessibility of this text to a wider audience. Códice Maya de México offers a unique portrait of the codex, tracing its history from the 16th-century Spanish invasion while documenting the historical erasure of a pivotal period in Mesoamerican history and the efforts to recover the knowledge lost in the burning of Maya books. Combining research from previous investigations of the Códice Maya de México with new perspectives on scribal arts and astronomy, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Mesoamerican history and ancient language systems.