Relation des choses de Yucatán
by Diego de Landa
Diego de Landa arrived in the Yucatán in 1549. He was appointed the second Catholic Bishop of Yucatán on April 30, 1572.
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Bishop Landa recorded the following;
"Among the Maya we found a large number [thousands] of books " and "burned them all."
After Diego de Landa had destroyed these ancient books he decided that someone should record information concerning the Maya people so he wrote the book "Relacion of Landa", or also known as, "Landa's Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatán".
He is the author of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán in which he catalogues the Maya religion, Maya language, culture and writing system.
This manuscript was written around 1566, but like so many similar manuscripts from the Colonial Period of Nueva Espana, it was lost or suppressed. For about 200 years, Landa's valuable written work was in effect non-existent. It was stuffed away in the Bibiloteca de la Academia de la Historia, of Madria, Spain.
The original copies have long since been lost. The account is known to us only as an abridgement, which in turn had undergone several iterations by various copyists. The extant version was produced around 1660, and was discovered by the 19th-century French cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862. Brasseur de Bourbourg published the manuscript two years later in a bilingual French-Spanish edition, entitled Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa.
The first edition of Relacion of Landa was published in French in 1864 and in English in 1937.
Coming soon - Relation des choses de Yucatan by Diego de Landa (English)
Relation des choses de Yucatan by Diego de Landa (1864 in Spanish)