This site features a searchable translation and analysis of four codices (screenfold books) painted by Maya scribes before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. The codices contain information about Maya beliefs and rituals, as well as everyday activities, all framed within an astronomical and calendrical context.

The Maya Codices. The Maya developed a sophisticated writing system many centuries before their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century. In what are now southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and portions of Honduras and El Salvador, the Maya wrote using a system of hieroglyphs instead of an alphabet.

The Maya codices are screenfold books painted on paper made from the bark of the fig tree. They were produced by coating the paper with a stucco wash and then painting it with glyphs and pictures.

The Madrid Codex is the longest of the existing Maya hieroglyphic manuscripts, containing over 250 separate “almanacs” that place events of both a sacred and secular nature within the 260-day Mesoamerican ritual calendar.

This website offers many opportunities to learn more about these important documents of the ancient Maya. General background information on the codices may be accessed by clicking selections under Learn about the Codices .

The Provenience and Dating of the Maya Codices. We know nothing about the origin and acquisition of the Maya codices (with the exception of the Grolier Codex); as a result, their proveniences are either unknown or uncertain.

Information in the Maya codices is formatted in one of two ways—what epigraphers call tables and almanacs. The two may be distinguished in that tables contain dates in the Long Count calendar, whereas almanacs generally only record tzolk'in dates …

The Maya Hieroglyphic Codices. This page includes links to fourteen slides that make up a presentation on the Late Postclassic Maya. To download the presentation, click on each of the slides individually.

2000c Pre-Hispanic Maya Religion: Conceptions of Divinity in the Postclassic Maya Codices. Ancient Mesoamerica 11:123-147. 2001 Scribal Hands and Language Use in the Madrid Codex.

Moreover, despite the efforts of Bishop Landa and the Inquisition to destroy all traces of idolatry (including hieroglyphic writing), codices were still secretly being used for several generations after the conquest. The Spanish chroniclers provide several early descriptions of Maya books.