Only 4 Texts Remain from the Maya Civilization After Thousands Were Destroyed
Despite the fact that we are not very far removed from their heyday, we know very little about Maya civilization.
And it’s not because the Maya weren’t into recording their history.
The Maya were prolific writers and actually evolved from using scrolls to a form of folded paper called the codex right around the same time as the Romans, though each appears to be independent of the other.
[…]
Maya glyphs and the records of the Spanish conquistadors themselves attest to thousands of these codices existing by the time the two cultures met in the 16th century.
But, due to their being destroyed by priests, conquistadors, ship raiders, and even time and mold, only about 22 codices, of which only four have Maya origin, exist today.
None of them are complete, and none have their original covers.
[…]
And you might have noticed that the oldest one only goes back to 200-300 years before the Spanish conquest.
We know that the codices went back at least 800 years prior to that, so we’re essentially looking at the tip of a fingernail and trying to guess what the hand looked like.
And that’s how the soul of a culture gets erased from history…
See also: Burning the Maya Books: The 1562 Tragedy at Mani
The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. (Wikipedia)
But that’s just the thing, that co-optation of local traditions I mentioned? It happened in Yucatán as well! That sort of thing happened everywhere in the portuguese and spanish empires where state power was too far for the comfort of local landlords. This being the early modern state, we are talking about almost across the whole territory. This makes a lot of sense because many of those same landlords were themselves former native elites.
The spanish themselves, in this instance, had a choice to make and they made it.
That’s a very good point of clarification: that really was a choice and “human nature” platitudes are deeply unserious indeed.