The ancient Maya produced thousands of books — folded bark-paper screenfold manuscripts painted with hieroglyphic texts and detailed illustrations covering astronomy, ritual, divination, and history. In July 1562, Diego de Landa, the Franciscan bishop of Yucatán, ordered an auto-da-fé at Maní in which he burned 27 hieroglyphic rolls and 5,000 cult images. He later wrote that this caused the Maya "great affliction." Four codices survived — preserved in European libraries, having been sent there as curiosities before the systematic destruction. They are among the most precious documents that exist.
Diego de Landa is one of history's most contradictory figures. He was the man who ordered the burning of the Maya books — an act of cultural destruction whose scale we can only imagine, since we have no way of knowing what was in the thousands of manuscripts that were destroyed. He was also the man who, years later, wrote the most comprehensive account of Maya culture, language, and religion that exists — the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán — which preserved enough information about the hieroglyphic system to eventually enable its decipherment.
Landa believed he was destroying devil worship. He was not a stupid man or simply a brute — he was a serious, devout Franciscan who was genuinely convinced he was saving Maya souls from damnation. The horror of the burning is not diminished by understanding his motives; it is deepened. The most destructive acts of cultural erasure in history have almost always been committed by people who believed they were doing good.
We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and which caused them much affliction.
— Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de YucatánThe Maya astronomical achievement documented in the codices is genuinely extraordinary. The Dresden Codex's Venus tables track the 584-day synodic cycle of Venus with an error of only 14 seconds per year — achieved through centuries of careful observation and recorded in a mathematical notation system that can handle numbers in the millions. The eclipse tables predict lunar eclipses with sufficient accuracy that modern astronomers have verified them.
The Long Count calendar — the system that generated the famous 2012 date — is not in the surviving codices but in stone inscriptions. It counts from a mythological creation date in 3114 BCE and can express dates millions of years in the past or future. The Maya conception of time was cyclical but also vast — they thought in timescales that dwarf anything in Western tradition before modern astronomy.