Page:The Katunes of Maya History.djvu/24

16 These opinions of Señor Perez might cast a well grounded suspicion on the authenticity of the manuscript. We shall try to remove such doubts, at once, by presenting the following considerations. We do not believe that Bishop Landa succeeded in burning the entire treasures of Maya literature at the notorious auto-da-fé in the town of Mani in 1561. The authorities to which we have access describe the number of the destroyed objects so precisely that we have every reason to confide in their correctness. We read of 5,000 idols of different size and form, 13 large altar stones, 22 smaller stones, 197 vessels of every form and size, and lastly of 27 rolls (sic) on deerskin covered with signs and hieroglyphics, given to destruction at that time and place. We may believe that the terrorism exercised by Bishop Landa had a powerful influence on the minds and on the newly converted consciences of the natives, and the Bishop no doubt used every possible means to get into his hands as much as he could of what he considered to be " cabalistic signs and invocations to the devil." But we can never believe that these 27 rolls represented the entire Maya literature, collected, for hundreds of years with the greatest care and held sacred by the natives. Such a wholesale destruction would have been an impossibility. We could refer to a similar occurrence that took place in Mexico; and though Bishop Zumarraga has the bad reputation of having destroyed all the picture treasures of the Nahuatls by an auto-da-fé there were notwithstanding so many of them in existence soon after his time in the possession of native families that Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, and others, were able to buildup their detailed accounts of the primitive history of their country from these original sources. Possibly numbers of them may have been preserved among the Maya tribes, for only under such favorable conditions could Oogolludo, Yillagutierre and Lizana have obtained