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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...