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p. 185

APPENDIX

[a] A Note by Sylvanus Griswold Morley

The Popol Vuh, or Sacred Book of the ancient Quiché Maya, as it has been
happily subtitled, is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the most
distinguished example of native American literature that has survived
the passing centuries.

The original redaction of this most precious fragment of ancient
American learning is now lost; however, it seems first to have been
reduced to writing (in characters of the Latin script), in the middle of
the sixteenth century, from oral traditions then current among the
Quiché, by some unknown but highly educated, not to say literary, member
of that race.

This now lost original was again copied in the Quiché language, again in
characters of the Latin script, at the end of the seventeenth century,
by Father Francisco Ximénez, then parish priest of the village of Santo
Tomás Chichicastenango in the highlands of Guatemala, directly from the
original sixteenth-century manuscript which he had borrowed for the
purpose from one of his Indian parishioners.

The /Popol Vuh/ is, indeed, the Sacred Book of the Quiché Indians, a
branch of the ancient Maya race, and contains an account of the
cosmogony, mythology, traditions, and history of this native American
people, who were the most powerful nation of the Guatemala highlands in
pre-Conquest times. It is written in an exalted and elegant style, and
is an epic of the most distinguished literary quality.

Indeed, the chance preservation of this manuscript only serves to
emphasize the magnitude of the loss which the world has suffered in the
almost total destruction of aboriginal American literature.

//

/Museum of New Mexico/

/Santa Fé, June 22, 1948/

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