Título de Totonicapán

The Título de Totonicapán (Spanish for "Title of Totonicapán"), sometimes referred to as the Título de los Señores de Totonicapán ("Title of the Lords of Totonicapán") is the name given to a K'iche' language document written around 1554 in Guatemala. The Título de Totonicapán is one of the two most important surviving colonial period K'iche' language documents, together with the Popol Vuh. The document contains history and legend of the K'iche' people from their mythical origins down to the reign of their most powerful king, K'iq'ab.

In 1834 the K'iche' inhabitants of Totonicapán asked the departmental governor to persuade Dionisio José Chonay, the curate of Sacapulas, to translate the document into Spanish. The Spanish translation was archived in Totonicapán where it was found by French historian Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1860. Brasseur de Bourbourg made a copy of the document and took it with him back to France, where it was passed on to Alphonse Pinart after the former's death. From Pinart this copy passed into the ownership of Hyacinthe de Charencey who produced a French translation and published both the French and Spanish texts under the title Título de los Señores de Totonicapán: Titre généalogique des seigneurs de Totonicapan. The whereabouts of the original K'iche' document was unknown for many years until it was shown to American anthropologist Robert Carmack by the K'iche' mayor of Totonicapán in 1973.

The introductory section of the Título includes large parts of the Theologia Indorum, written by Dominican friar Domingo de Vico in the mid-16th century. In the 1953 translation by Delia Goetz she says: "The said manuscript consists of thirty-one quarto pages; but translation of the first pages is omitted because they are on the creation of the world, of Adam, the Earthly Paradise in which Eve was deceived not by a serpent but by Lucifer himself, as and angel of light. It deals with the posterity of Adam, following in every respect the same order as Genesis and the sacred books as far as the captivity in Babylonia. The manuscript assumes that the three great Quiché nations with which it particularly deals are the descendants of the Ten Tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, whom Shalmanser reduced to perpetual captivity and who, finding themselves on the border of Assyria, resolved to emigrate."

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