Diego de Landa, Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (c. 1566, first printed 1864)

The Franciscan who burned the Maya books wrote, in the same account, the list of Maya day signs and sound signs that became the first key anyone had to reading them. Both sentences sit on facing pages of the edition that finally printed him in 1864, three centuries after he wrote, from a copy found in the archives of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. The destruction and the record of what was destroyed have the same author, and neither can be reported without the other.