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.
Why this wins its question: Landa is normally delivered as one fact — the friar who burned the Maya codices — or, in the reply to it, as one other fact: the friar whose alphabet unlocked Maya writing. Both sentences are in the same paragraph of the same book, and this object prints them in the order the book prints them, from the 1864 sheets opened page by page. It adds what neither version carries: the half-title's admission that the text is drawn from what Landa wrote rather than written by him, the editor's footnote that his manuscript is an incomplete copy made about thirty years after Landa's death and printed with its faults, Landa's own statement that he set the signs down only to give a complete account, the sentence in which the scribe writes three signs for what the friars insisted were two letters, and the demonological framing on the very page that preserves the katun cycle. It also marks what it cannot establish, which the confident versions on both sides do not.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The text was first printed at Paris in 1864 by Auguste Durand, with Bailly-Bailliere at Madrid, as the third volume of the Collection de documents dans les langues indigenes pour servir a l'etude de l'histoire et de la philologie de l'Amerique ancienne, edited by the abbe Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, with the Spanish text and a French translation printed facing one another.
What was printed is a copy, and the edition says so on its own half-title, which reads "RELACION DE LAS COSAS DE YUCATAN sacada de lo que escrivio el padre fray Diego de Landa de la orden de San Francisco" — drawn from what Landa wrote, rather than what Landa wrote.
The editor states the manuscript's standing in a footnote: the Madrid manuscript from which he copied the document "n'est pas l'original de Landa, mais une copie faite trente ans environ apres sa mort, si l'on en juge par l'ecriture"; it appears incomplete; the copyist unintentionally suppressed the chapter titles that divided it while leaving provincialisms and a spelling barely intelligible even to a Spaniard; and he prints it with its faults, dividing it into small paragraphs of his own to make reading easier.
He also states where he got it: the relation was copied the previous winter in the archives of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, and he thanks the censor, the members and the librarian of that academy for favouring his researches. The document that carried Maya writing into the nineteenth century had survived in a Spanish institutional archive.
Landa describes Maya writing as writing. These peoples used "certains caracteres ou lettres, avec lesquelles ils ecrivaient dans leurs livres leurs choses antiques et leurs sciences", and by them and by certain figures and particular signs within those figures they understood their matters, gave them to be understood, and taught them.
The next sentence is the destruction, in the first person plural and without evasion: "Nous leur trouvames un grand nombre de livres dans ces caracteres, et, comme ils n'en avaient aucun ou il n'y eut de la superstition et des mensonges du demon, nous les leur brulames tous, ce qu'ils sentirent vivement et leur donna de l'affliction." The affliction of the owners is recorded by the man who caused it.
The sentence immediately after it is the record that partly repaired the loss: "De leurs lettres, je mettrai ici un A, B, C". The pages following print the sign forms as engraved cuts set into the text, with worked examples — le, meaning a noose and to hunt with one; ha, meaning water; and the phrase ma in kati, meaning I do not want, written out in separate signs.
Landa gives his motive for including material he found tedious, and it is documentary: "yo no pusiera aqui ni tratara dello sino por dar cuenta entera de las cosas desta gente" — he would not have set it down or treated of it but to give a complete account of the things of this people.
The misunderstanding that the list is built on is legible in the text itself. Landa records that for the word le, "haviendoles nosotros hecho entender que son dos letras, lo escrivian ellos con tres, puniendo a la aspiracion de la l la vocal e, que antes de si trae" — the friars had told the scribe the word was two letters and the scribe wrote three signs. The list was collected as an alphabet from a script that was not alphabetic, which is why later readers had to work against its framing as well as with its contents.
The 1864 editor already saw what the sign list was worth. He calls the alphabet, incomplete as it may be, of considerable interest "en ce qu'il est la premiere clef des inscriptions mysterieuses" still standing in numbers at Yucatan, Palenque and Copan, and reports that by comparing the characters with Codex mexicain no 2 of the imperial library and with the Dresden American codex he had recovered all the calendar signs reproduced by Landa and about a dozen phonetic signs, and had read words such as ahpop and ahau.
The editor's judgement on the burning is printed as a footnote on the page facing it, in 1864 and not later: the learned and civilised world will hardly pardon the first Spanish religious this deplorable ignorance, so little in accord with the sentiments Landa himself expresses in relating so many interesting things; and the reproach is harder to press, he adds, when one recalls the burning of the archives of the Chinese empire at the imperial palace of Peking by the soldiers of the English armies in the presence of those of France.
The frame that destroyed the books is on the same page as the material that preserved them. The calendar cycle of the katuns, with the idols Buluc-Ahau, Bolon-Ahau and Uac-Ahau succeeding one another every ten and twenty years, is set down in detail and then dismissed as superstitions and jugglery, more than enough "pour tromper ces gens simples", to be wondered at only by someone who does not know what the things of nature are and what experience of them the demon has.
The editor is a weak guide even where his transcription is valuable. The hundred and twelve pages of introduction that precede the text are an essay arguing that the primitive history of Mexico and of Egypt illuminate each other, closing on Carthaginian secrecy and classical notices of lands beyond the Atlantic; claims resting on Brasseur's interpretation are held at low confidence here, and only his acts and his sightings are relied on.
What this object does not establish should be said. No page opened for it records when the burning took place, where, on whose authority, how many books were destroyed, or what happened to the people who owned them; the text read here gives the act and the affliction and nothing more. Those questions are left to sources not reachable for this entry.