Codex Grolier

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Page 7 of the Codex

The Codex Grolier (also known as the Mexico Maya Codex or Sáenz Codex ) is one of four pre-Columbian manuscripts of the ancient Maya culture.

history

It is believed that the codex, along with other artifacts, came from a robbery excavation in a cave in Chiapas in the 1960s (1965) . The Mexican collector Dr. José Saenz was abducted by the sellers in a small plane to a place near the Sierra de Chiapas and Tortuguero. There he was shown the finds and bought the Codex fragment. He had it examined by Michael D. Coe and the Codex was first exhibited in 1971 in the Grolier Club in New York and thus received his name. Dr. Saenz donated the Codex to the Mexican Government and today it is kept in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City , but not on display.

The manuscript was long thought to be a forgery. Although the paper actually turned out to be pre-Hispanic bark paper in radiocarbon dating , the painting was classified by Nikolai Grube in 2012 as "definitely a forgery of the 20th century". More recent studies, however, have confirmed the authenticity of the codex. For example, the portrayal of the mountain god with a split head on page 9 of the Codex has long been considered an obscure invention of the forgers. More recent archaeological finds from Tancah and Pasión del Cristo show this god on artifacts. The fact that counterfeiters knew about this god before it appeared in later finds seems very unlikely and is therefore used as an argument for authenticity.

description

The Maya books were made as Leporello , so that you could open and look at any number of pages side by side. The writing material is made of fig bark ( Amatl ) paper. The paper was coated with lime and then painted.
The representation of the figures in the Grolier Codex differs from representations in the other three Maya codices and is more similar to the representations of the Mixtec and Toltec from central Mexico. The left edge of each page contains a series of seven different day symbols that correlate with number symbols used by the Maya. Each combination of day and number symbol represents a date Tzolkin , which corresponds to a certain manifestation of Venus.
The Grolier Codex originally consisted of 20 sheets, fragments of 10 sheets painted on one side of which have been preserved. 11 pages are often mentioned, but the fragments of pages 10 and 11 have now been assigned to the same page. The original size was about 12.5 × 18 cm. The leaves 4 to 6 are still connected to one another as originally. It is believed that the first eight and the last two pages were lost. The damaged condition of the paper contradicts the good preservation of the painting. This is one reason why there are doubts about the authenticity of the Codex. Dating with the help of the C-14 measurement showed, at least for the paper, an origin around 1230 AD. Thus, the codex would be the oldest surviving Mayan book. According to the latest research and scientific investigations, the Codex was created between 1021 and 1154.

content

The Codex was recognized as an astrological Almanac of Venus , which predicted the heavenly position of the planet Venus over a period of 104 years. It is similar to the part of the Dresden Codex that relates to Venus. While the Dresden Codex only describes Venus as the morning star and evening star , all four situations are recorded in the Codex Grolier: as a morning star, disappearing in the upper conjunction , as an evening star and again invisible in the lower conjunction.

Each side shows a figure / deity looking to the left, holding a weapon and usually a rope with a prisoner. Pages 5 and 8 show a figure hurling an arrow into a temple . The figure depicted on page 7 may show a warrior standing passively in front of a tree. Pages 1 and 4 suggest K'awiil and pages 2, 6 and page 10, which consists of two fragments, suggest a god of death .

Web links

Commons : Codex Grolier  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ famsi.org - Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  2. ↑ Michael D. Coe : The secret of Maya writing . Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 1997, ISBN 3-499-60346-2 .
  3. ↑ Nikolai Grube : The Dresden Maya Calendar: The Complete Codex . Herder Verlag, Freiburg, 2012, ISBN 978-3-451-33332-3 , pp. 21-22.
  4. ^ Doug Criss: This Maya document, long considered a fake, is Americas' oldest manuscript . CNN, September 8, 2016.
  5. ↑ a b c Coe, Michael; Stephen Houston; Mary Miller; Karl Taube : Maya Archeology 3: Featuring the Grolier Codex . Ed .: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press. 2015, ISBN 978-0-9859317-0-4 , pp. 256 .
  6. ↑ John B. Carlson: GROLIER CODEX Page Study Guide [1]
  7. ↑ a b c National Geographic Society (ed.): Sunken Reiche der Maya . Weltbild Verlag GmbH, 1997, ISBN 3-86047-808-7 .
  8. ↑ INAH Boletín N ° 299, August 30, 2018 [2]