A Book, a Calendar and the People Who Still Keep It

The Popol Vuh, the fullest surviving account of Maya creation and of the Hero Twins, is a K'iche' text, written in the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century by K'iche' authors and copied in the eighteenth by the Dominican Francisco Ximenez, whose manuscript is why it survives. The four surviving pre-conquest codices are in Mayan languages in the hieroglyphic script, and the monumental inscriptions of the classic cities record dynastic and ritual history in the same.

Taken together this is a larger and older body of indigenous religious text than survives from anywhere else in the Americas, and almost all of it was destroyed: Diego de Landa's burning of Maya books at Mani in 1562 is the single best documented act of that destruction and was not the only one. What survives alongside the texts is practice. The 260-day count has been kept without a break for more than two thousand years, and it is kept today by daykeepers in the Guatemalan highlands who name the days, read them and train successors. The atlas notes this carefully: the calendar is a living office held by particular people in particular towns, not a system anyone can pick up, and the correct description of it is the one those communities give.