Mayas Surviving the Colonial Genocide

ANDREW D. TURNER, ed. — CODICE MAYA DE MEXICO — GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE — J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM — LOS ANGELES — 2022

This book is essential if you want to understand a few things about the stakes of the recently inaugurated Maya Train which will be interconnected with the Interoceanic Train to be built in the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. All that in Mexico. This will mean a tremendous boost for Maya culture, Maya language, and the “resurrection” of the old glyphic writing. Here are some of these stakes present in the book.

1- This is the fourth Maya Codex that has escaped the autodafé the Spanish colonizers performed in the 16th century in Mexico, in Mesoamerica. They burned all the books (only four escaped) and banned the Maya glyphic syllabary writing system, and of course, the Maya and other Mexican religions were declared once and for all satanic, diabolical, heretical, or whatever other words the Spanish Crown and Inquisition decided to use to justify that worst imaginable, planned, and systematic cultural genocide, and the Mayas who resisted were “genocided” along with the books. Thousands of invaluable books were destroyed and we do not have real figures about the extermination of people who decided to resist.

2- This particular Codice, ten pages partly impaired by time, ten pages missing, was saved because it had been buried along with its owner. That’s the value of these codices: they represent all the Mayas believed in about life, the supernatural, the cosmos, time, and calendrical events and cycles, hence science. They had three calendars: the Tzolk’in calendar, the sacred calendar of 13 cycles of 20 days, hence two hundred and sixty days; the Haab’ or Ja’ab’ calendar, the solar calendar of 18 cycles of 20 days plus 5 extra days at the end of the year, the Wayeb’, the very ominous and terrifying group of five days that could be seen as a nineteenth month, even if very short (one-fourth of a normal twenty-day month, by the way “month” is a Western and European word. The Maya word is “winal,” see below), and this produces a solar…