# Codice Maya de Mexico > Unknown Maya scribe - c. AD 1021-1154 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-maya-scribe/codice-maya-de-mexico/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-18 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Maya scribe - **Date:** c. AD 1021-1154 - **Medium:** Amate (fig-bark paper), three-ply, faced on both sides with a gypsum ground, painted in lamp black, hematite red, Maya blue and cochineal brown - **Dimensions:** Ten surviving pages, typically about 12.5 cm wide; the tallest fragment, folio 8, measures 19 cm. Red frame lines show the pages were once substantially taller, and the complete screenfold would have measured about 250 cm - **Object type:** Manuscript - **Period:** Maya, Early Postclassic - **Current location:** Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City - **Attribution:** attributed ## Summary The oldest surviving book of the Americas, and the only one of the four known Maya codices that is still in the hemisphere that made it. Ten pages survive of an original twenty, painted on three-ply fig-bark paper faced with gypsum, recording the synodic cycle of Venus in a hybrid notation that mixes Maya bars and dots with the single dots of Central Mexico. Radiocarbon and pigment analysis place it between 1021 and 1154.Its entire modern history is a demonstration of what an absent find-spot costs. In 1965 or 1966 the Mexican collector Josue Saenz was telephoned by a man who called himself Gonzales, flown from Villahermosa in a light aircraft whose compass had been covered with a cloth, and set down on a remote airstrip in the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas, where villagers showed him a codex, a mosaic mask and other objects said to have come from a dry cave. His own authenticator called them fakes. He bought anyway. The cave has never been located, identified or excavated.Because there was no context, the manuscript was attacked as a forgery for forty years - most damagingly by J. Eric S. Thompson in 1975, who never saw it. It was defended by Michael Coe, who had shown it at the Grolier Club in New York in 1971 and who, asked at the time where it came from, would say only that it was a real hot potato lent by an anonymous owner. Vindication came from materials science: no modern pigment, Maya blue made with palygorskite, a gypsum ground, radiocarbon dates on the paper, and the demonstration that the sharp edges critics read as scissor cuts were breaks in the plaster and the work of arthropods. On 30 August 2018 the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia ratified it as authentic and renamed it the Codice Maya de Mexico. The find-spot is still unknown, and everything a proper excavation would have told us about the book is still gone. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1021-1154** Painted by a single Maya scribe; patron, place of production and library unrecorded `[documented]` (origin) The date rests on radiocarbon determinations on the paper: 1035-1431 in a 1972 test, 1050-1284 in 2012, and further dates under the Mexican programme narrowing to 1021-1154. The style has been related to late painting at Chichen Itza and to the Mixtec manuscript tradition. Nothing is known of who commissioned or used it. - **-1965 or 1966** Said to have been in a dry cave in the highlands of Chiapas, near Tortuguero; never verified `[unknown]` (gap) The cave is a claim made by the men who sold the book and repeated ever since. It has never been located, identified, entered or excavated by anyone. The objects said to have been found with it - a mosaic mask, a wooden box, a knife handle, a child's sandal, a length of rope and eight blank sheets of unstuccoed fig-bark paper - would have constituted a unique Maya funerary or ritual deposit if they had been recorded together. They were not. - **1965 or 1966-1966** Unidentified looters and villagers, Sierra de Chiapas `[disputed]` (looting and first sale) Josue Saenz was contacted by a caller giving the name Gonzales, who telephoned three times and told him to take the first flight to Villahermosa in Tabasco. He was met by strangers, put into a light plane whose compass was covered with a cloth, and landed at a remote airstrip in the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas, where villagers produced looted material. Accounts differ on what happened next: Michael Coe records that Saenz was allowed to take the objects to Mexico City for authentication, Karl Meyer that the villagers refused and demanded a decision on the spot. Meyer records that Saenz offered 2,000 dollars, that the villagers produced a Parke-Bernet auction catalogue to show they knew American prices, and that he wrote a post-dated cheque for more. - **1966-the 1970s** Dr Josue Saenz, Mexico City `[documented]` (purchase) Saenz was a Mexican collector whose holdings founded the Museo Amparo in Puebla. He told an interviewer that he had begun collecting pre-Hispanic art in 1944 and stopped buying in 1972 when a new Mexican law made all unregistered antiquities the property of the nation. His own expert, the art authority Jose Luis Franco, judged the material fake; he bought regardless. - **20 April 1971-5 June 1971** On loan, anonymously, to the Grolier Club, New York `[documented]` (exhibition) Shown in an exhibition organised by Michael Coe. The catalogue Coe published in 1973, The Maya Scribe and His World, gave the owner inaccurately as a private collection, New York. Asked in 1973 by the journalist Karl Meyer where the codex had come from, Coe said only that it was a real hot potato lent to the Grolier Club by an anonymous owner. The manuscript takes its old name from these seven weeks. - **the 1970s-2018** The Mexican state; held in a vault at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City `[disputed]` (transfer to Mexico) How the codex passed to Mexico is not settled. One account has the Attorney General of Mexico invoking the United States-Mexico treaty of July 1970 on the recovery and return of stolen archaeological, historical and cultural property, in 1976, producing a seizure and an official return - a rare invocation of that instrument. Most accounts simply record a donation by Saenz without naming a date or a donor. Trafficking Culture flags the timing and the circumstances as unclear and notes that the volume usually cited for the return does not in fact cover it. For decades afterwards the book was in a vault and not on public display. - **30 August 2018-present** The Mexican state; Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City `[documented]` (ratification and renaming) The Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia published Boletin 299 ratifying the manuscript as the oldest authentic book of the Americas and renaming it the Codice Maya de Mexico. It was shown at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia for three weeks in September and October 2018, and a new facsimile was published by the Mexican government the same year. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This manuscript has never been sold at auction and has no hammer price, no premium and no published purchase price. The only figure in the record is an offer: Josue Saenz offered 2,000 dollars at the airstrip, the villagers refused, produced a Parke-Bernet auction catalogue to demonstrate what Mexican antiquities were making in New York, and Saenz wrote a post-dated cheque for a larger sum that no account specifies. It should be noted that a widely mirrored statement that the codex first appeared at an auction in the late 1960s cannot be traced to any account of a sale, and appears to derive from a misreading of that catalogue in the looters' hands. A price list brandished by a seller is not a sale record. ## Open questions - Where is the cave? No location has ever been given, entered or excavated, and the only people who could say are the men who sold the book in 1965 or 1966. - Was the codex transferred to Mexico by treaty seizure or by donation? One account has the Attorney General of Mexico invoking the 1970 United States-Mexico treaty in 1976; most accounts record only an undated donation by Saenz. The two are entirely different legal events. - Were the mask now at Dumbarton Oaks and the codex found together? Coe published that they were; the connection rests on his later telling and on a dealer's statement to a journalist, and the small plane and the cave appear nowhere in the literature around the 1971 exhibition. - How many leaves survive, ten or eleven, and was the original twenty pages or twenty-one? Current Mexican accounts and Trafficking Culture disagree. - Do the missing pages survive anywhere? The first eight and the last two of the original screenfold are unaccounted for. - What is the relationship of the eight blank fig-bark sheets to the painted ones? One of them supplied the radiocarbon date Coe published in 1973, which means the earliest published date for this manuscript was measured on a sheet with no painting on it. - What was the 1971 exhibition actually called? Trafficking Culture gives Ancient Maya Calligraphy and other accounts give The Maya Scribe and His World, which is certainly the title of Coe's 1973 book. - How much did Saenz pay? He is recorded as offering 2,000 dollars and then writing a post-dated cheque for more. No account consulted gives the figure, or says whether the codex and the mask were paid for together. - Is the manuscript on public display in 2026? The last exhibition traced is the three-week showing at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in September and October 2018; before that it spent decades in a vault. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Maya Codex of Mexico'. TERTIARY, but densely referenced to the Mexican publication El Codice Maya de Mexico, antes Grolier (INAH, 2018) and to Coe, Miller, Houston and Taube, 'The Fourth Maya Codex', Maya Archaeology 3. Used for the 1021-1154 date range, the INAH ratification and renaming of 30 August 2018 (Boletin 299), the surviving extent and dimensions, the three-ply amate and gypsum ground, the pigment identifications, the 1972 and 2012 radiocarbon dates, the palygorskite identification of 2007, the arthropod damage and the moisture episodes, the page-by-page iconography, the Venus arithmetic, the style comparisons with Chichen Itza and the Mixtec codices, the Grolier Club dates of 20 April to 5 June 1971, the 1976 invocation of the 1970 United States-Mexico treaty, and the three-week showing at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in September and October 2018. To be replaced with the INAH volume of 2018 and with Coe and colleagues (2015). - [2] Wikimedia Commons file page for the lead plate, 'Grolier Codex, page 6.jpg', a reproduction of a page of this manuscript released as a faithful photograph of a two-dimensional public domain work. Read in the raw wikitext for the licence rather than through the API summary; the companion file for page 1 gives its source as mayavase.com. - [3] Donna Yates, 'Grolier Codex', Trafficking Culture encyclopedia, University of Glasgow, last modified 8 September 2016. Source for the Saenz acquisition story and its variants, the eight blank fig-bark sheets and the AD 1230 plus or minus 130 date published by Coe in 1973, the inaccurate ownership line in Coe's 1973 catalogue, the 'real hot potato' remark to Karl Meyer, Thompson's 1975 arguments and the old-paper objection, Baudez on futility, the Ruvalcaba findings of 2008, the 2016 rebuttals, Saenz's statement to Irene Herner about the 1972 law and the Museo Amparo, and the note that the timing and circumstances of the transfer to Mexico are unclear while the 1970 treaty invocation is recorded by Vitelli (1977). - [4] Donna Yates, 'Mosaic Maya Mask', Trafficking Culture encyclopedia, University of Glasgow, last modified 19 February 2017. Source for the Gonzales telephone calls, the flight from Villahermosa, the refusal to let the objects leave the airstrip in Meyer's version, the 2,000 dollar offer and the Parke-Bernet catalogue, the stopped cheque that had already been cashed, the sale through dealers into the United States, Gordon Ekholm's microscopic examination and the beard, Mildred Barnes Bliss's purchase in 1966, and the caution that the connection between mask and codex is not established. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.