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Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya
Popol Vuh The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya Author:Adrian Recinos, Delia Goetz, Sylvanus G. Morley This is the first complete version in English of the "Book of the People" of the Quiche Maya, the most powerful nation of the Guatemalan highlands in pre-Conquest times and a branch of the ancient Maya, whose remarkable civilization in pre-Columbian America is in many ways comparable to the ancient civilization of the Mediterranean. Ge... more »nerally regarded as America's oldest book, the Popol Vuh, in fact, corresponds to our Christian Bible, and it is, moreover, the most important of the five pieces of the great library treasures of the Maya that survived the Spanish Conquest.
The Popol Vuh was first transcribed in the Quiche language, but in Latin characters, in the middle of the sixteenth century, by some unknown but highly literate Quiche Maya Indian -- probably from the oral tradition of his own people. This now lost manuscript was copied at the end of the seventeenth century by Father Francisco Ximenez, then parish priest of the village of Santo Tomas Chichicastenango in the highlands of Guatemala, today the most celebrated and best-known Indian town in all of Central America.
The mythology, traditions. Cosmogony, and history of the Quiche May, including the chronology of their kings down to 1530, are related in simple yet literary style by the Indian chronicler. And Adrian Recinos has made a valuable contribution to the understanding of the document through his thorough-going introduction and identification of places and people in the footnotes.
This is Volume 29 in the University of Oklahoma Press series, The Civilization of the American Indian.
The new Spanish translation by Adrian Recinos is from the original Ximenez manuscript in Quiche after he had discovered differences, omissions, and changes in the text published by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1861. From Mr. Recinos' Spanish edition, first published in Mexico in 1947, Delia Goetz, author and translator, and Sylvanus G. Morley, authority on all things Mayan, undertook the preparation of this English translation.« less