Dresden Codex
The codex contains information relating to astronomical and astrological tables, religious references, seasons of the earth, and illness and medicine.
The pages are made of amate, 20 centimetres (7.9 in) high, and can be folded accordion-style; when unfolded the codex is 3.7 metres (12 ft) long.
It is written in Mayan hieroglyphs and refers to an original text of some three or four hundred years earlier, describing local history and astronomical tables.
The pages consist of a paper made from the pounded inner bark of a wild species of fig, Ficus cotinifolia,[4][5] (hu'un in Maya—a word that became semantically equivalent to “book”).
[17] The Dresden Codex is described by historian J. Eric S. Thompson as writings of the indigenous people of the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico.
Maya historians Peter J. Schmidt, Mercedes de la Garza, and Enrique Nalda confirm this.
[19] British historian Clive Ruggles suggests, based on the analyses of several scholars, that the Dresden Codex is a copy and was originally written between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.
[22] Johann Christian Götze (1692–1749), German theologian and director of the Royal Library at Dresden, purchased the codex from a private owner in Vienna in 1739 while traveling to Italy.
[13][19][23] Thompson speculates that the codex was sent as a tribute to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor by Hernán Cortés, governor of Mexico, since examples of local writings and other Maya items were sent to the king in 1519 when he was living in Vienna.
[13][24] The codex was eventually catalogued into the Royal Library of Dresden in 1744, where it remained relatively obscure until the early twentieth century.
In 1828 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque had identified this book as being of Maya origin based on its glyphs looking like those found at Palenque.
[44] Italian artist and engraver Agostino Aglio, starting in 1826, became the first to transcribe and illustrate the codex completely for Irish antiquarian Lord Kingsborough, who published it in his nine volumes of Antiquities of Mexico in 1831–48.
It received direct water damage that was significantly destructive, from being kept in a flooded basement during the World War II bombing of Dresden in February 1945.
[47] The librarian K. C. Falkenstein adjusted the relative position of pages for “esthetical reasons” in 1836, resulting in today's two similar length parts.
