The Dresden Codex
The Dresden Codex (named for the city where it is housed) is a fig bark paper manuscript in concertina style, produced around the beginning of the 13th century (a contentious point). The seventy four pages are sewn together producing an eleven foot document which was originally folded up between protective wooden covers bearing engraved jaguars. As the most complete of the few remaining Maya manuscripts, it is a comprehensive source for Maya calendar and astronomy systems and an aid to glyph interpretation in the wider iconography of the Maya culture..jpg)
Hernán Cortés, excited by stories of the lands which Columbus had recently discovered, sailed from Spain in 1505 landing in Hispaniola which is now Santo Domingo. After farming there for some years he sailed with Velázquez to conquer Cuba in 1511. He was twice elected major of Santiago then, on 18 February 1519, he sailed for the coast of Yucatán with a force of 11 ships, 508 soldiers, 100 sailors, and 16 horses. He landed at Tabasco on the northern coast of the Yucatán peninsular. He met with little resistance from the local population and they presented him with presents including twenty girls. He married Malinche, one of these girls.
The people of the Yucatán peninsular were descendants of the ancient Mayan civilization which had been in decline from about 900 AD. It is the mathematical achievements of this civilisation which we are concerned with in this article. However, before describing these, we should note that Cortés went on to conquer the Aztec peoples of Mexico. He captured Tenochtitlán before the end of 1519 (the city was rebuilt as Mexico City in 1521) and the Aztec empire fell to Cortés before the end of 1521. Malinche, who acted as interpreter for Cortés, played an important role in his ventures.
In order to understand how knowledge of the Mayan people has reached us we must consider another Spanish character in this story, namely Diego de Landa. He joined the Franciscan Order in 1541 when about 17 years old and requested that he be sent to the New World as a missionary. Landa helped the Mayan peoples in the Yucatán peninsular and generally tried his best to protect them from their new Spanish masters. He visited the ruins of the great cities of the Mayan civilization and learnt from the people about their customs and history.
However, despite being sympathetic to the Mayan people, Landa abhorred their religious practices. To the devote Christian that Landa was, the Mayan religion with its icons and the Mayan texts written in hieroglyphics appeared like the work of the devil. He ordered all Mayan idols be destroyed and all Mayan books be burned. Landa seems to have been surprised at the distress this caused the Mayans.
Nobody can quite understand Landa's feelings but perhaps he regretted his actions or perhaps he tried to justify them. Certainly what he then did was to write a book Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1566) which describes the hieroglyphics, customs, temples, religious practices and history of the Mayans which his own actions had done so much to eradicate. The book was lost for many years but rediscovered in Madrid three hundred years later in 1869.
A small number of Mayan documents survived destruction by Landa. The most important are: the Dresden Codex now kept in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden; the Madrid Codex now kept in the American Museum in Madrid; and the Paris Codex now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. The Dresden Codex is a treatise on astronomy, thought to have been copied in the eleventh century AD from an original document dating from the seventh or eighth centuries AD. .jpg)
"The height of Maya civilization in what are now parts of Central America and Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula lasted for most of the first millennium CE, and elements of Maya culture survived until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century.
Among the greatest accomplishments of the Maya was the development of highly sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems, both of which played an important role in their religious beliefs and practices."
"The Dresden Codex was written by eight different scribes using both sides. They all had their own particular writing style, glyphs and subject matter. [..] Its images were painted with extraordinary clarity using very fine brushes. The basic colors used from vegetable dyes for the codex were red, black and the so-called Mayan blue."
The Dresden Codex is believed to be a copy of an original text that was composed between about 700 to 900 AD, prompting some historians to assert that it's the earliest known book from the Americas. The surviving copy may have been one of a number of pre-Columbian works sent to Europe by Hernán Cortés in 1519. It first surfaces in recorded history in 1739 when it was purchased from a private collection in Vienna by the (then) Royal Library of Dresden (now: Sächsische Landesbibliothek).
The manuscript has been published in various facsimile and reproduction formats beginning with Alexander von Humboldt's inclusion of a few codex pages in one of his books in the early 1800s. During the bombing of Dresden in WW2 the manuscript suffered water damage but it has since been restored.
Although a couple of versions of the Dresden Codex have been online for some time, they are - as far as I can tell - interpretive reproductions or doctored photographic facsimiles and the image quality varies. So it's good to see that the Dresden Library last month uploaded (fairly) high resolution unaltered images of all the pages from the codex. The dual-page and detail image is from the 1933 Gates reproduction (of variable accuracy, so it is said) of the Dresden Codex.
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