Researchers in anthropology and Maya archeology methodically verify the authenticity of the oldest known manuscript in ancient America
Date: September 7, 2016
Source: Brown University
Summary: The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s. But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America.
This is an image from the Grolier Codex, the oldest known manuscript in ancient America.
Credit: Justin Kerr
But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America.
Stephen Houston, the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and co-director of the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University, worked with Michael Coe, professor emeritus of archeology and anthropology at Harvard and leader of the research team, along with Mary Miller of Yale and Karl Taube of the University of California-Riverside. They reviewed "all known research on the manuscript," analyzing it "without regard to the politics, academic and otherwise, that have enveloped the Grolier," the team wrote in its study "The Fourth Maya Codex."
The paper, published in the journal Maya Archaeology, fills a special section of the publication and includes a lavish facsimile of the codex.
The study, Houston said, "is a confirmation that the manuscript, counter to some claims, is quite real. The manuscript was sitting unremarked in a basement of the National Museum in Mexico City, and its history is cloaked in great drama. It was found in a cave in Mexico, and a wealthy Mexican collector, Josué Sáenz, had sent it abroad before its eventual return to the Mexican authorities."
Controversial from the outset
For years, academics and specialists have argued about the legitimacy of the Grolier Codex, a legacy the authors trace in the paper. Some asserted that it must have been a forgery, speculating that modern forgers had enough knowledge of Maya writing and materials to create a fake codex at the time the Grolier came to light.
The codex was reportedly found in the cave with a cache of six other items, including a small wooden mask and a sacrificial knife with a handle shaped like a clenched fist, the authors write. They add that although all the objects found with the codex have been proven authentic, the fact that looters, rather than archeologists, found the artifacts made specialists in the field reluctant to accept that the document was genuine.
Some ridiculed as fantastical Sáenz's account of being contacted about the codex by two looters who took him -- in an airplane whose compass was hidden from view by a cloth -- to a remote airstrip near Tortuguero, Mexico, to show him their discovery.
And there were questions, the authors note, about Sáenz's actions once he possessed the codex. Why did he ship it to the United States, where it was displayed in the spring of 1971 at New York City's Grolier Club, the private club and society of bibliophiles that gives the codex its name, rather than keep it in Mexico? As for the manuscript itself, it differed from authenticated codices in several marked ways, including its relative lack of hieroglyphic text and the prominence of its illustrations.
"It became a kind of dogma that this was a fake," Houston continued. "We decided to return and look at it very carefully, to check criticisms one at a time. Now we are issuing a definitive facsimile of the book. There can't be the slightest doubt that the Grolier is genuine."
Full read at the link https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160907125300.htm
