"From the mighty Maya civ­i­liza­tion, which dom­i­nat­ed Mesoamer­i­ca for more than three and a half mil­len­nia, we have exact­ly four books. Only one of them pre­dates the arrival of Span­ish con­quis­ta­dors in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry: the Códice Maya de Méx­i­co, or Maya Codex of Mex­i­co, which was cre­at­ed between 1021 and 1152. Though incom­plete, and hard­ly in good shape oth­er­wise, its art­work - col­ored in places with pre­cious mate­ri­als - vivid­ly evokes an ancient world­view now all but lost."
"At first pro­nounced a fake by experts, due to its lack of resem­blance to the oth­er extant Mayan texts, it was only ver­i­fied as the gen­uine arti­cle in 2018. For a non-spe­cial­ist, the ques­tion remains: what is the Códice about? Its pur­pose, as Kil­roy-Ewbank puts it, is astro­nom­i­cal, relay­ing as it does "infor­ma­tion about the cycle of the plan­et Venus" - which, as Turn­er adds, "was con­sid­ered a dan­ger­ous plan­et" by the Mayans."
The Maya Codex of Mexico was created between 1021 and 1152 and is the only known pre‑Columbian Maya manuscript, and one of four surviving Maya books. The codex is fragmentary and worn but contains colored artwork made with precious materials that reflect a sophisticated ancient worldview. The manuscript conveys astronomical information, especially detailed calculations and observations of the planet Venus, which the Maya regarded as dangerous. The codex emerged in a private Mexico City collection in the 1960s and was rumored to have been looted from a Chiapas cave. The manuscript faced prolonged skepticism and was authenticated as genuine in 2018.
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