‘I have to admit, none of that sounds bad to me. Why is he so reviled?’
‘Why?’ Hamilton asked rhetorically. ‘The main reason that modern scholars like myself are reliant on Landa’s book is because he personally burned the Mayan glyphs. If he hadn’t done that, our knowledge of the Maya would be much more advanced. We would be able to read Mayan history in the hand of the Maya, not his distilled version of ancient events.’
‘Landa translated the documents, then burned them?’
He nodded gravely. ‘Are you familiar with the term “auto-da-fé”? It was a ritual used during the Spanish Inquisition.’
She grimaced in disgust. The ceremony was one of the skeletons in the Church’s closet that they would rather forget. ‘The term meant “act of faith” in medieval Spanish. The ritual involved a Catholic Mass, followed by a public procession of the condemned and a reading of their sentences. Torture was quite common, so was burning at the stake.’
Hamilton lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘In July of 1562, Landa ordered an auto-da-fé in the city of Maní. At the end of the ceremony, he burned more than twenty thousand Mayan images and a reported five thousand Mayan idols, claiming they were the “works of the devil”. This marked the beginning of a new campaign, where Mayan nobles were jailed, interrogated and tortured to speed up the mass adoption of Catholicism. Scared for their lives, thousands of Maya fled from the cities and into the jungles to avoid abuse.’
‘He burned twenty-five thousand items? The fire must have been huge.’
‘It could be seen for miles and signalled the start of Landa’s brutal regime. Over the next several decades, the Spanish burned every Mayan document they could get their hands on — much to the dismay of the Maya, who were forced to watch their entire history go up in flames.’
She took a deep breath. ‘The thought of it sickens me.’
Hamilton nodded in agreement. ‘Do you know how many Maya are still living in Mesoamerica today?’
She shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Approximately ten million. That’s a significant amount when you consider there are less than three million Native Americans still living in the United States.’
‘Ten million is way more than I figured.’
‘Amazingly, do you know how many Mayan codices managed to survive?’
She shook her head, unwilling to guess.
Hamilton held up his hand with his fingers spread. Then he tucked his little finger under his thumb. ‘Only three.’
11
Maria thought back to Hamilton’s earlier pronouncement, when he had claimed that the Maya vanished overnight during the ninth century, and figured he would amend his statement about the Mayan codices. But unlike before, no correction was forthcoming.
He wiggled his three extended fingers to illustrate the point. ‘I know it’s tough to fathom, but only three codices survived the Spanish conquest and the eventual spread of Christianity. Because of their near extinction, Mayan codices are considered priceless.’
‘Are they on display in Mexico? I’d love to see them.’
He shook his head. ‘Like most items plundered from the New World, they are currently in Europe. As such, each of the codices is named for the city where it eventually settled. The Dresden Codex is being held in the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Germany. The Paris Codex is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France. And the third one, The Madrid Codex, is in the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain.’
‘It’s being guarded by Spain? That’s disturbingly ironic.’
‘Trust me, it’s a fact that isn’t lost upon Mayan scholars. If they had their way, all three of the codices would be returned to the Yucatán, where they rightfully belong.’
In 1965, a fourth codex was supposedly discovered in a Mexican cave, but its authenticity has been questioned ever since. Named after the Grolier Club of New York City, an association of bibliophiles that first presented the document to the world, the Grolier Codex consists of eleven damaged pages from a presumed twenty-page book. Since its pages are far less detailed than the other codices and its information is very similar to the Dresden Codex, most experts believe it is a forgery. Therefore, it is usually ignored by academics.
‘With your background, I assume you’ve worked with codices.’
She nodded. ‘The Romans invented them as a replacement for scrolls in the first century AD. Their widespread popularity is generally associated with the rise of Christianity, which used the format for the Bible from the very beginning. No pun intended.’
Named for the Latin word caudex, which literally means ‘block of wood’, a codex is a book with multiple sheets of paper (or papyrus, etc.) that have been folded, stitched, bound together and given a cover. Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, the codex has multiple advantages over the scroll, which had been the main form of book in the ancient world. In addition to its sturdiness, a codex provides random access to the information it contains, meaning it can be opened to any page, as opposed to the scroll, which offers only sequential access. Furthermore, codices — the plural form of codex — were much cheaper to make than scrolls, because both sides of the page could be used, thus saving paper.
Hamilton took the napkin from his lap and placed it on the table. Then he began folding it lengthwise, similar to a paper fan, one careful fold after another. ‘Mayan codices are different from Roman codices because they were painted on bark cloth, not paper, and screen-folded in this fashion. Made from the inner bark of fig trees, the cloth was far more durable than papyrus and better for writing. Unfortunately, the three codices that survived are relatively new. They were written during the Colonial period, an era that started with the arrival of the Spanish.’
‘That’s less than five hundred years ago.’
He nodded, all too familiar with the maths. ‘Based on the carbon dating of a site in Belize, the Mayan civilization started as early as 2600 BC. That means over four thousand years of history was destroyed by Landa and his men — information we may never recover.’
As a historian, Maria knew the Maya had been around for a long time, but she had never grasped quite how long until that moment. Growing up in Italy, she had heard many stories about Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin brothers who had founded the city of Rome on 21 April 753 BC. Her father used to preach about the date’s significance, saying it, and not the emergence of Ancient Greece, was the ‘true’ beginning of Western Civilization. Despite her hatred of the man, his notion of history had wormed its way into her brain, somehow becoming the benchmark of comparison for anything she examined.
Constantinople? Founded a thousand years after Rome.
The Ottoman Empire? Two thousand years after Rome.
And so on.
In her field of study, she never had to go before that date. Her mental timeline started in 753 BC and marched towards the birth of Christianity and the present.
But the Maya? They were off the chart in the other direction.