Fifty years after it was sold by marauders, the ancient pictographic text of the Maya Indians was recognized by scholars as authentic. We are talking about the so-called Code of Guillers - a 10-page document that contains Mayan hieroglyphs, images of gods and a calendar that tracks the movements of Venus.
In the late 1960s, the Mexican collector Jose Saenz acquired the manuscript from some marauders, but since then no one has been able to confirm its real dating and prove its authenticity until the National Institute of History and Anthropology of Mexico took over.
According to the new expert opinion, the Guillier code was created between 1021 and 1154 AD. and is thus the oldest known pre-Hispanic document. Therefore, from now on, 10 surviving pages of the lost "book" will be called the Mexican Mayan Code.
The cover of the book was made of paper and bark, then covered with a special compound similar to plaster and painted. The original book contained 20 pages, but only the first eight and the last two have survived. Moreover, all pages are pretty badly damaged.
According to the modern interpretation, the Maya wrote their texts in the form of syllabic words, where the syllables were denoted by one or another stylized figure. Each figure holds a weapon and a rope leading to the held captive. In this case, the text is contained only on one side of the page - so that all syllabic figures are turned to the left.
Mexican collector José Saenz bought the document, he claims, in 1964 and first presented it to the public in New York City in 1971. The presentation took place in the Grolier club, which is where the original name of the document came from - the Gulier code.
The collector donated the book to the Mexican authorities in 1974, but it was possible to date the document only using the most modern methods.
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As it turned out, the cover paper used as the basis for the bark sticker contained a carbon isotope, which made it possible to calculate the time of its creation. This is around 1212 AD, making the Guillier Code (now the Mexican Mayan Code) the oldest Mesoamerican document.
However, both the absence of half of the pages and the very small number of surviving Mesoamerican texts do not allow researchers to begin a complete translation and decoding of the written source.
The only thing that scientists have been able to understand at the moment is that the code focuses on the movement of Venus in the firmament and the related predictions. Perhaps the predictions relate to the return of the Mayan supreme god Kukulkan (Quetzalcoatl), the “feathered serpent”, who, according to myths, came from Venus and promised to return before “the end of days”.