Madrid Codex

The manuscript reached Europe in pieces and was not recognised as one book. Two separate fragments surfaced in Spain in the nineteenth century, were published and named independently, and were catalogued as distinct Maya manuscripts before a scholar noticed that they joined. The composite names still used for the parts preserve that history, and page numbering in the older literature can refer to either the fragments or the reconstructed whole, which is a standing source of confusion in citations. The physical object is a screenfold of bark paper coated with lime plaster, painted on both sides and folded like a concertina, which is the standard Mesoamerican book form.

Only a handful of Maya books survived the systematic burning of them after the conquest, and this is the longest of them. Its scribes were not equal. The hands differ noticeably in skill and habit across the manuscript, and the number of them has been argued at length, with proposals ranging from a small team to a much larger group working in sequence or side by side. That variation is one of the very few direct windows onto how such books were produced, since no workshop, no tools and no unfinished example survive to show the process from any other angle, and the painted pages have to answer the question on their own.

The content is more ordinary than the surviving codices are often taken to be. Alongside the divinatory tables that set the days of the sacred count against deities and the offerings due to them, there are almanacs concerned with beekeeping, with deer hunting and trapping, with planting, with weaving and with the making of images. The book is a working reference for a specialist whose responsibilities covered the practical year as well as the ritual one, and it does not separate the two. That combination is the historical value of it. Inscriptions on monuments record dynasties and rites; this records what the calendar was for in the life of a community, which the monuments never say. Its date is disputed and the dispute has an unusual piece of evidence in it.

The codex is generally placed in the late Postclassic period, but a fragment of European paper was found incorporated into one of its pages, which has been used to argue for a date after Spanish contact and to suggest the book was still in use, or being made, under colonial conditions. The atlas records the late Postclassic attribution as the standard view and the post contact argument as a live minority position rather than a settled correction.