Codex Dresdensis

The Dresden Codex is the oldest surviving book from the Americas, dating to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The codex was rediscovered in the city of Dresden and is how the Maya book received its present name. It is located in the museum of the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Germany.

The book received serious water damage during World War II. The pages are 8 inches (20 cm) high and can be folded accordion-style; when unfolded the codex is 12 feet (3.7 m) long. It has Mayan hieroglyphs and refers to an original text of some three or four hundred years earlier, describing local history and astronomical tables.

The Dresden Codex contains 78 pages with decorative board covers on the front and back. Most pages have writing on both sides. They have a border of red paint, although many have lost this framing due to age deterioration. The pages are generally divided into three sections; students of the codex have arbitrary labeled these sections a , b , and c . Some pages have just two horizontal sections, while one has four and another five sections. The individual sections with their own theme are generally separated by a red vertical line. Sections are generally divided into two to four columns.

The Dresden Codex is one of four hieroglyphic Maya codices that survived the Spanish Inquisition in the New World. Three, the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices, are named after the city where they were ultimately rediscovered. The fourth is the Grolier Codex, located at the Grolier Club in New York City. The Dresden Codex is held by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB Dresden, Saxon State Library) in Dresden, Germany. The Maya codices all have about the same size pages, with a height of about 20 centimetres (7.9 in) and a width of 10 centimetres (3.9 in).

The pictures and glyphs were painted by skilled craftsmen using thin brushes and vegetable dyes. Black and red were the main colors used for many of the pages. Some pages have detailed backgrounds in shades of yellow, green, and the Mayan blue. The codex was written by eight different scribes, who all had their own writing style, glyph designs, and subject matter.

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