• Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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    9 months ago

    Any day we uncover more texts that somehow escaped the Spanish book burnings is a good day.

    Always makes me sad to think about all the literature lost with the Maya codices.

    • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I couldn’t agree more. Mayan, Mixtec, Tlaxcallan, and dozens of other cultures had the majority of their history obliterated. Knowledge built through millennia burned in a couple centuries.

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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        9 months ago

        Not just history either but art. Barely any poetry survives, and I’m sure there were other works of fiction lost, like stories of myths and legends.

        • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I’ve got a couple books translated from Nahuatl into English that have some of the flowery words of the tlamatinime, “Scattering of Jades” and “Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World”. They are very precious because like you said barely anything survives. It’s incredibly sad.

  • Minarble
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    9 months ago

    Amazing that this survived in private hands.

    The Spanish burnt all they could find for quite a while for “Christian” reasons. So much knowledge lost forever.

    • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Don’t blame religion. They burned them to control the population and wipe out the culture. Religion was just an excuse.

  • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Yep they got Altepetl(s) and Xiuhpohualli day signs as year markers drawn on to them, they are codices.

    Hope I can get some high quality scans of them.

    • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I can’t find that word in the article. Do you mean the Spanish translator for Nahuatl from the 1600’s wrote the wrong name for Huitzilopochtli on the amatl? That happened a lot.