''Relación de las cosas de Yucatán'' was written by

Diego de Landa Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. He led a campaign against idolatry and human sacrifice.Timmer, 480 In doing so, he burne ...

around 1566, shortly after his return from

Yucatán Yucatán, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, constitute the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises 106 separate municipalities, and its capital city is Mérida. ...

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

. In it, de Landa catalogues Mayan words and phrases as well as a small number of Maya hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs, sometimes referred to as the

de Landa alphabet The de Landa alphabet is the correspondence of Spanish letters and glyphs written in the pre-Columbian Maya script, which the 16th-century bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa, recorded as part of his documentation of the Maya civilization. Desp ...

, proved vital to modern attempts to decipher the script. The book also includes documentation of

Maya religion The traditional Maya or Mayan religion of the extant Maya peoples of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and the Tabasco, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Campeche and Yucatán states of Mexico is part of the wider frame of Mesoamerican religion. As ...

and the

Maya people Maya () are an ethnolinguistic group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived w ...

s' culture in general. It was written with the help of local

Maya Maya may refer to: Ethnic groups * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Mayan languages, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (East Africa), a p ...

princes. It contains, at the end of a long list of

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

words with Maya translations, a Maya phrase, famously found to mean "I do not want to." The original manuscript has been lost, but many copies still survive. The first published edition was produced by Charles Etienne Brasseur de Boubourg in 1864 under the title ''Relation des choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa. Texte espagnol et traduction française en regard comprenant les signes du calendrier et de l’alphabet hiéroglyphique de la langue maya accompagné de documents divers historiques et chronologiques, avec un grammaire et un vocabulaire abrégés français-maya précédés d’un Essai sur les sources de l’histoire primitive du Mexique et de l’Amérique centrale, Etc., d’après les monuments égyptiens et de l’histoire primitive de l’Égypte d’après les monuments américains''. Colonialist scholar John Woodruff has suggested that one passage in particular stands out as the principal basis for the belief that late post-classic Maya had numerous written books: ::"These people also used special characters or letters with which they recorded in their books their histories and knowledge, as well as figures, and particular signs in those figures explained it all, and lent it meaning and understanding. We found a great number of books containing such letters, and as they did not contain an iota in which there was not superstition and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which dismayed and distressed them greatly."Translation by Woodruff. The original Spanish reads: "Usavan tambien esta gente de ciertos carateres o letras con las quales escrivian en sus libros sus cosas antiguas, y sus sciencias, y con ellas, y figuras, y algunas señales en las figuras entendian sus cosas, y las davan a entender y enseñavan. Hallamosles grande numero de libros destas sus letras, y porque no tenian cosa en que no uviesse supersticion y falsedades del demonio se les quemamos todos, lo qual a maravilla sentian, y les dava pena." Currently-available English translations include William E. Gates's 1937 translation, has been published by multiple publishing houses, under the title ''Yucatan Before and After the Conquest: The Maya''. Alfred Tozzer of

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropologica ...

has also published a translation of the work from the

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

in 1941.

Bibliography

* ''An Interpretation of Bishop Diego De Landa's Maya Alphabet'', by Marshall Durbin (Philological and documentary studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 171 179). * * .

References

Maya civilization Spanish-language literature about Mesoamerica 1560s books {{mexico-hist-stub

See also

Bibliography

References