This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rabinal Achi is generally dated to the fifteenth century, before the Spanish conquest reached the Kiche Maya kingdoms, but for roughly four hundred years afterward it existed nowhere on paper at all. The Spanish conquest that swept through highland Guatemala in the sixteenth century destroyed the overwhelming majority of pre-Columbian Maya written and performed culture, and Rabinal Achi survived that destruction only because the community of Rabinal kept performing it, generation after generation, entirely from memory, under the cover of a performance calendar that colonial authorities read as a Catholic saint's day observance rather than as the preservation of a pre-conquest dynastic drama.
The text finally reached paper only in the 1850s, when a local cofrade named Bartolo Sis dictated the entire drama, in the Kiche language, to Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French Catholic cleric and antiquarian traveling through the region, who translated and published it. That transcription is the reason the play is known outside Guatemala at all, but it is worth noting what it was not: it did not create the tradition, preserve a manuscript that would otherwise have been lost, or standardize a text that had drifted apart in performance. Rabinal's own dancers had already kept Rabinal Achi alive, unwritten, for four centuries by the time Brasseur de Bourbourg arrived to write it down, and the town's cofradias have continued performing it, script or no script, ever since.