Four Books Survived the Fires

Only four pre-conquest Maya hieroglyphic codices are known to survive today, including the Madrid Codex referenced elsewhere in this atlas for its rain-related prayer content, out of what was almost certainly a much larger body of Maya written material destroyed during the Spanish conquest, most infamously in a mass burning of Maya books ordered by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa in 1562 specifically intended to eliminate what Spanish colonial authorities regarded as idolatrous religious content, an act of deliberate destruction that scholars of Mesoamerican religion consider one of the most significant single losses of indigenous American textual heritage in the entire colonial period. This severe loss means the surviving pre-conquest Maya hieroglyphic material, precious specifically because it predates and was not filtered through colonial-era Spanish transcription, represents only a small and possibly unrepresentative fragment of what pre-conquest Maya religious literature actually contained, a survival rate considerably lower than for some other ancient corpora catalogued in this atlas where destruction was less deliberate and comprehensive.

Landa himself later became an important, if deeply ironic, secondary source on Maya culture, since his own later writings describing Maya customs, produced partly in an attempt to justify his actions to Spanish authorities, are today used by scholars alongside the surviving codices precisely because so much of the primary material he helped destroy is otherwise permanently lost.