A Second, Later Source Written After the Fires

Alongside the surviving pre-conquest hieroglyphic codices, the Popol Vuh, the major Kiche Maya narrative of creation catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, represents a different and later kind of source, transcribed into the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century, likely by literate Kiche nobles recording older oral and possibly hieroglyphic tradition in a new written form specifically in order to preserve it under conditions of colonial suppression of indigenous religious material, giving it a transmission history closer in kind, though not identical in every particular, to the colonial-era recording that produced the Aztec Florentine Codex material discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Ongoing decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic script, a project still actively developing among specialists and not yet fully complete even after decades of significant scholarly progress, continues to affect how confidently scholars can read and interpret the surviving pre-conquest material, meaning translations and interpretations of texts such as the Madrid Codex's rain-related content remain subject to ongoing revision as decipherment work progresses. This entry records the corpus as a whole and the genuinely different evidentiary status of its pre-conquest hieroglyphic and later colonial-era alphabetic sources.