Mesoamerican Pictographic Codex

Timeline

1. c. 300–900Maya lowlands and highlands · Maya regionIn Classic Maya city-states, the priestly class systematically produced codices on amate bark paper, recording the 260-day sacred calendar, the 584-day Venus cycle, and mythological genealogies, serving royal divination and ritual date selection.
2. 1161–1170Yucatán and Oaxaca · MexicoIn the Postclassic period, Chichén Itzá, Mayapan, and Mixtec regions continued producing and using pictographic codices, recording calendrical prophecies, trade routes, and political events; later survivals such as the Dresden Codex may descend from this tradition.
3. c. 1521–1562Yucatán Peninsula · YucatánSpanish colonizers and the Church viewed codices as heretical documents and burned them on a large scale; only a few codices were dispersed to Europe for preservation, causing a devastating loss of pre-Columbian pictographic written records.