Page 9 and Page 8 of Códice Maya de México (c. 1100) (all images courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Secretaría de Cultura-INAH-México; all ...

Detail of eye on page 6 of the Grolier Codex (photo by Michael Coe, all courtesy Brown University) In the 1960s, looters searching a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, came across a rare, ancient codex rich ...

Dating from 1100, the fourth known Maya codex reveals this ancient civilization’s staggering understandings of — and reverence for — time, the cosmos and the role of the human scribe. Representing the ...

We know about civilization and its discontents: the renunciations of desires, the energies required to maintain a social order, the labors needed to tame nature’s forces. But in contemporary life, so ...

We gather much of what we know about Maya astronomical knowledge from detailed records they themselves created on the pages of bark-paper books called codices. In the mid-sixteenth century, Franciscan ...