Ancient Maya civilizations and their hieroglyphic texts have been a source of public fascination for centuries. Several writings have provided keys to their decipherment. The earliest was Spanish missionary Diego de Landa’s representation of the Spanish alphabet in Maya hieroglyphics contained in his 1566 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán.
In the 19th century, another group of publications reproduced images of ancient monuments and painted screenfold books called “codices.” The Latin American Library holds copies of most of these early groundbreaking manuscripts and publications of the 19th century that were instrumental in the breakthroughs made by linguists, epigraphers, and Maya scholars over the course of the twentieth century.
Current understanding and appreciation for the prowess of ancient Maya astronomers and calendar priests began in Europe with a ground-breaking study by Ernst W. Förstemann (1822–1906) of the Venus Table in an original Maya codex held in the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden, Germany. Förstemann’s first encounter with images of the Dresden Codex was through reading Edward Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico (1831) held in the same institution where he afterwards served as chief librarian (1865–1877). Förstemann would later publish a color facsimile of the Dresden Codex.