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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 08 2016, @08:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the forging-ahead dept.

The authenticity of the Grolier Codex, a controversial Mayan document, has been verified by researchers:

The study, Houston said, "is a confirmation that the manuscript, counter to some claims, is quite real. The manuscript was sitting unremarked in a basement of the National Museum in Mexico City, and its history is cloaked in great drama. It was found in a cave in Mexico, and a wealthy Mexican collector, Josué Sáenz, had sent it abroad before its eventual return to the Mexican authorities."

For years, academics and specialists have argued about the legitimacy of the Grolier Codex, a legacy the authors trace in the paper. Some asserted that it must have been a forgery, speculating that modern forgers had enough knowledge of Maya writing and materials to create a fake codex at the time the Grolier came to light. The codex was reportedly found in the cave with a cache of six other items, including a small wooden mask and a sacrificial knife with a handle shaped like a clenched fist, the authors write. They add that although all the objects found with the codex have been proven authentic, the fact that looters, rather than archeologists, found the artifacts made specialists in the field reluctant to accept that the document was genuine.

[...] Houston and his co-authors analyzed the origins of the manuscript, the nature of its style and iconography, the nature and meaning of its Venus tables, scientific data — including carbon dating — of the manuscript, and the craftsmanship of the codex, from the way the paper was made to the known practices of Maya painters. Over the course of a 50-page analysis, the authors take up the questions and criticisms leveled by scholars over the last 45 years and describes how the Grolier Codex differs from the three other known ancient Maya manuscripts but nonetheless joins their ranks.

The Grolier's composition, from its 13th-century amatl paper, to the thin red sketch lines underlying the paintings and the Maya blue pigments used in them, are fully persuasive, the authors assert. Houston and his coauthors outline what a 20th century forger would have had to know or guess to create the Grolier, and the list is prohibitive: he or she would have to intuit the existence of and then perfectly render deities that had not been discovered in 1964, when any modern forgery would have to have been completed; correctly guess how to create Maya blue, which was not synthesized in a laboratory until Mexican conservation scientists did so in the 1980s; and have a wealth and range of resources at their fingertips that would, in some cases, require knowledge unavailable until recently.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:39PM (#399170)

    Diego de Landa [wikipedia.org] perhaps?

    "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."

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