INTRODUCTION. Xxiii 



Father Diego Lopez Cogolludo is the best-known historian of Yucatan. 

 He Hvecl about the middle of the seventeenth century, and says himself 

 that at that time there was little more to be learned about the antiquities of 

 the race. He adds, therefore, substantially nothing to our knowledge of 

 the subject, although he repeats, with positiveness, the statement that the 

 natives "had characters by which they could understand each other in 

 writing, such as those yet seen in great numbers on the ruins of their 

 buildings." ^ 



This is not very full. Yet we know to a certainty that there were 

 quantities of these manuscripts in use in Yucatan for a generation after 

 Cogolludo wrote. To be sure, those in the christianized districts had been 

 destroyed, wherever the priests could lay their hands on them; but in the 

 southern part of the peninsula, on the islands of Lake Peten and adjoining 

 territory, the powerful chief, Canek, ruled a large independent tribe of 

 Itzas. They had removed from the northern provinces of the peninsula 

 somewhere about 1450, probably in consequence of the wars which followed 

 the dissolution of the confederacy whose capital was the ancient city of 

 Mayapan. 



Their language was pure Maya, and they had brought with them in 

 their migration, as one of their greatest treasiu'es, the sacred books which 

 contained their ancient history, their calendar and ritual, and the prophecies 

 of their future fate. In the year 1697 they were attacked by the Spaniards, 

 under General Don Martin de Ursua; their capital, on the island of Flores, 

 in Lake Peten, taken by storm ; great numbers of them slaughtered or 

 driven into the lake to drown, and the twenty-one temples which were on 

 the island razed to the ground. 



A mimite and trustworthy account of these events has been given by 

 Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, in the course of which several 

 references to the sacred books, which he calls Analtes, occur. 



The king Canek, he tells us, in reading in his Analtes, had found 

 notices of the northern provinces of Yucatan and of the fact that his pre- 



' Diego Lopez Cogolludo, Historia de Yucatan, lib. iv, cap. iii. The original is: "No acostiim- 

 Ijrabau escribir los i)leitos, aunque teuiau caracteroa con quo se eateudian, do quo se veu muchos eu las 

 I'uiiias do los edilicios." 



