codices

Léon de Rosny, a French ethnologist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote this volume describing a Native Central American object in the collection of a Spanish museum. In the 1860s, two fragments of ancient Mayan language surfaced in Spain. Léon de Rosny was one of the first scholars to suggest that both fragments⁠—the Cortesianus Codex described in this volume and the Troano Codex—were part of the same monumental artifact, later known as the “Madrid Codex.” The Codex Cortesianus, which de Rosny describes in this volume, is the smaller piece.