Chilam Balam Of Ixil Facsimile And Study Of An Unpublished Maya Book

In Chilam Balam of Ixil Laura Caso Barrera translates for the first time a Yucatec Maya document that resulted from the meticulous reading by the Colonial Maya of various European texts.

An illuminating look at the myriad communities who have engaged with the ancient Maya over the centuries. This book reveals how the ancient Maya—and their buildings, ideas, objects, and identities—have been perceived, portrayed, and exploited over five hundred years in the Americas, Europe, and beyond. Engaging in interdisciplinary analysis, the book summarizes ancient Maya art and history from the preclassical period to the Spanish invasion, as well as the history of outside engagement with the ancient Maya, from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century to later explorers and archaeologists, taking in scientific literature, visual arts, architecture, world’s fairs, and Indigenous activism. It also looks at the decipherment of Maya inscriptions, Maya museum exhibitions and artists’ responses, and contemporary Maya people’s engagements with their ancestral past. Featuring the latest research, this book will interest scholars as well as general readers who wish to know more about this ancient, fascinating culture.

This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers’ encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of "cultural temporalities" in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues.

Only nine documents of the "Chilam Balam" survive. These documents of the Chilam Balam describe the native Yucatec Mayan worldview from at least the time of the arrival of the Spaniards five hundred years ago. Since 1975, Dr. Richard N. Luxton became fascinated by and worked toward understanding the Books of Chilam Balam. He spent years translating and annotating the Tizimin, and the Chumayal before it, diligently going line-by-line over a facsimile copy of the original Tizimin in Roman script, but in the language of the Yucatec Maya. Richard N. Luxton worked with his Mayan friends in the Yucatan, both Don Pablo Canche Balam--their friendship is retold in an earlier work, The Mysteries of the Mayan Hieroglyph, and Don Valentino Vargas Chulin, on both translations. Without their contributions, the Mayan gospels of the Chilam Balam would have continued to be opaque and hidden. Dr. Richard Luxton's book, The Mayan Book of the Chilam Balam of Tizimin, is a connection back to the Mayan hieroglyphic tradition in the way a single metaphor and phrase represents a long process of thought admirably captured in a form of Roman script shorthand. The "Chilam Balams" were not written for outsiders, and that is their greatest value. The Tizimin has been translated into English twice before, but never as Dr. Richard N. Luxton has done, transcribed line-by-line from the original, and then meticulously adhered to by a line-by-line translation, like he did in the Chumayal.