Dresden Codex Essay

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The Dresden Codex was first heard of from Johann Christian Gotzem, Director of the Royal Library of Dresden. It was obtained from a private owner in Vienna in 1739. It was given to the Royal Library. It remains there now. Although it sustained heavy water damage It is still used for study purposes. (www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/dresden.html)
It is one of the few surviving hieroglyphic books produced by the Maya prior to the conquest of Mexico. The exact age of the Dresden codex is unknown, but evidence has narrowed the range to the 13th or 14th centuries and believed to be based on much older astronomical tables, possibly from the mid -eighth century CE. There are only four Mayan manuscripts still existing, the oldest is the Dresden …show more content…

It was originally folded in accordion folds, consisting of 39 double sided pages. It is approximately 3.5 meters long, fan folded into 39.9-centimeter-wide pages, 20.4 centimeters high and painted on both sides. The paper used for the Codex was amate, a Mesoamerican paper made of fibers from the Ficus tree and coated with white lime plaster. Painted in red and black the illustrations are in beautiful detail. The Codex contains hieroglyphs, numerals and figures. It contains ritual and divination calendars, calculations of the phases of Venus, eclipses of the sun and the moon. /there are instructions relating to the locations of the Rain God with a full-page miniature showing a great downpour of rain. According to researchers the numerical, calendrical and astronomic systems in the codex determined that the deities, numbers and day names in it are related to the 260 day Mayan calendar. They also used the codex to make important contributions to scholarly understanding of the Mayan Long Count calendar, which counted days from the Mayan creation date. There are 250 signs on the Dresden Codex out of 350 have been successfully deciphered. One of the most accurate astronomical tables to have been discovered is the Venus Table and the Lunar Series. The Venus Table shows the movements of the planet. (www.ancient-code.com/dresden

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