The Maya chronicles of Yucatan: the books of Chilan Balam and the town chronicles kept in the Latin alphabet (printed Philadelphia 1882)
After the hieroglyphic books were burned, Maya towns went on keeping their own histories in Maya, in the alphabet the missions had taught them, and went on copying them into the eighteenth century. The chronicles that survive are the work of Maya writers, not of Spaniards; one of them records both the burnings and the royal auditor who came from Castile to stop them.
Why this wins its question: The usual English treatment of the books of Chilan Balam is a paragraph about Landa's book burning followed by a list of surviving codices, which leaves the impression that Maya writing ended in 1562. What this object puts on the record instead is the continuity: the same introduction that quotes Landa saying he burned all he could lay hands upon also dates four Mani books to 1689, 1697, 1755 and 1761 and names their keeper as the village schoolmaster and chapel master. Beside it stands a Maya town chronicle recording, in the town's own voice, the friars who brought organ, flute and plainchant in 1552 and the royal auditor who in 1553 stopped the burnings and the dog attacks and reassessed the tribute item by item. The object also states what most secondhand quotations do not: the widely reprinted chronicle text is an English rendering of a Spanish rendering of a Maya copy.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Chilan Balam is a title rather than a proper name: in ancient times it designated the priest who announced the will of the gods and explained the sacred oracles, which is why so many books carry it. One of them, the Book of Chilan Balam of Mani, was composed not later than 1595 on internal evidence, and passages in Landa, Lizana, Sanchez Aguilar and Cogolludo show that many such native manuscripts existed in the sixteenth century. Several surviving rescripts date from the seventeenth century and most from the latter half of the eighteenth. The writers' names are generally not given, the editor holding that the books as they survive are all copies of older manuscripts.
The destruction that makes these books the surviving record is stated plainly, in the words of the man who ordered it. Twenty-seven rolls of deerskin parchment covered with hieroglyphics were among the articles burned by Bishop Landa at Mani in 1562, in a general destruction of everything which related to the ancient life of the nation; Landa himself says that he burned all that he could lay his hands upon, to the great distress of the natives - "Se les quemamos todos lo qual a maravilla sentian y les dava pena". Of the hieroglyphic books only three were then known to have escaped: the Codex Tro or Troano at Madrid, published by the French government in 1869, what was believed to be its second part, then in process of publication at Paris, and the Codex Peresianus in the National Library at Paris.
The alphabet outlived the burning in the hands of Maya townsmen, and the transmission can be traced to particular people. Four Books of Chilan Balam of Mani are recorded, dated 1689, 1697, 1755 and 1761. Berendt reports that the chronicle Pio Perez passed to the traveller John L. Stephens came from one in the possession of a native schoolmaster of Mani who, sharing the surname Balam, claimed descent from the original Chilan Balam; and Perez's own note at the close of his copy says that the book "se conserva en el Pueblo de Mani en poder del maestro de Capilla". The keeper of a Maya historical book in the eighteenth century was a village schoolmaster or chapel master - an office of the mission parish.
A Maya town chronicle records the arrival of royal justice in its own voice, as something that happened to the town. Under 1552 the chronicle of Chac Xulub Chen notes that the fathers settled there and came "to teach and sing here at Sisal ... mass vespers with the singing of the organ and flute, and the canto llano, which never before did we know here". Under 1553 it records that the Auditor, Don Thomas Lopez, arrived in Yucatan from Castile "as a messenger from our great ruler, the reigning king of Castilla, to protect us against the hand of the Spaniards here. He put a stop to our being burned by the Spaniards, he put a stop to our being bitten by dogs, he introduced the appointing of chiefs in each village by the giving of the baton; he also adjusted the tribute for the third time, the tribute introduced by the Spaniards, mantles, wax, pheasants, maize, buckets, salt, peppers, broad beans, narrow beans, jars, pots, vases". The abuse, the remedy and the assessed tribute are all named by the people who bore them.
The text most often reproduced from this tradition descends through a double translation, and the 1882 editor says so. The first publication of the Mani chronicle was in the appendix to the second volume of Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (New York, 1843), which printed the original Maya text together with "a not very accurate translation into English of Pio Perez's rendering of the Maya"; from Stephens's volume the document was copied into various publications in Mexico, Yucatan and Europe. Anyone quoting these chronicles at second hand is therefore quoting an English version of a Spanish version of a Maya copy.
The writers are treated by the editor as authorities on their own language rather than as informants. Arguing that the sixteenth-century form of the name is Maya and not Mayab, he sets "the educated natives whose writings I print in this volume" alongside the author of the Dictionary of Motul and the grammarian and lexicographer Gabriel de San Buenaventura, holding it impossible that such laborious and earnest students could all have fallen into the same blunder. The judgement is a nineteenth-century Americanist's, made in the course of an argument of his own, and the same introduction speaks of "the destructive bigotry of the Spanish priests"; both are recorded here as his.