Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices | Page 6

of much less value. We may pass in silence over
the notes added by Lord Kingsborough himself, in which he tries to
give support to his favorite hypothesis that the Jews were the first
settlers of America. Whoever wishes to obtain exact information
concerning the character and contents of the whole work and dreads the
labor of lifting and opening the volumes, may find a comprehensive
review of it in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 17, pp. 90-124, 8vo,
London, January, 1832, where he will also find a lucid exposition of
the history of the literature of Mexican antiquarian studies.
"In the middle of the third volume of the Mexican Antiquities (side
numbers are here absent) there is found the title 'Fac simile of an

original Mexican painting preserved in the Royal Library at Dresden,
74 pages.' These 74 pages are here arranged on 27 leaves in the
following manner:
Codex A. Codex B.
1, 2, 3, 46, 47, 48, 4, 5, 6, 49, 50, 51, 7, 8, 9, 52, 53, 54, 10, 11, 55, 56,
57, 12, 13, 14, 58, 59, 60, 15, 16, 17, 61, 62, 63, 18, 19, 64, 65, 66, 20,
67, 68, 69, 21, 22, 23, 70, 71, 72, 24, 25, 73, 74. 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45.
"On the whole, therefore, each leaf in Kingsborough comprises three
pages of our manuscript. Why the publisher joined only two pages in
the case of 10 and 11, 18 and 19, 24 and 25, and left page 20 entirely
separate, I cannot say; but when he failed to add 46 to 44 and 45 it was
due to the fact that here there is indication of a different manuscript.
"On January 27, 1832, Lord Kingsborough wrote a letter from
Mitchellstown, near Cork, in Ireland, to Fr. Ad. Ebert, then head
librarian at Dresden, thanking him again for the permission to have the
manuscript copied and telling him that he had ordered his publisher in
London to send to the Royal Public Library at Dresden one of the ten
copies of the work in folio. The original of the letter is in Ebert's
manuscript correspondence in the Dresden library.
"On April 27, 1832, when the copy had not yet arrived at Dresden, an
anonymous writer, in No. 101 of the Leipziger Zeitung, gave a notice
of this donation, being unfortunate enough to confound Humboldt's
copy with that of Lord Kingsborough, not having seen the work himself.
Ebert, in the Dresden Anzeiger, May 5, made an angry rejoinder to this
"hasty and obtrusive notice."[TN-1] Böttiger, whom we mentioned
above and who till then was a close friend of Ebert, on May 12, in the
last named journal, defended the anonymous writer (who perhaps was
himself) in an extremely violent tone. Ebert's replies in the same
journal became more and more ferocious, till Böttiger, in an article of
May 25 (No. 150 of the same journal), broke off the dispute at this
point. Thus the great bibliographer and the great archæologist were
made enemies for a long time by means of our codex.

"From Kingsborough's work various specimens of the manuscript
passed into other books; thus we find some in Silvestre, Paléographie
universelle, Paris, 1839-'41, fol.; in Rosny, Les écritures figuratives et
hiéroglyphiques des peuples anciens et modernes, Paris, 1860, 4to; and
also in Madier de Montjou, Archives de la société américaine de France,
2^de série, tome I, table V.
"In 1834 Ebert died, and was followed as head librarian by K. C.
Falkenstein. He, unlike his predecessor, strove especially to make the
library as much as possible accessible to the public. Visits and
examinations of the library became much more frequent, and our
manuscript, being very liable to injury, on account of its material, had
to be withdrawn from the hands of visitors, if it was desired to make it
accessible to their sight. It was therefore laid between glass plates and
thus hung up freely, so that both sides were visible. In this position it
still hangs in the hall of the library, protected from rude hands, it is true,
but at the same time exposed to another enemy, daylight, against which
it has been protected only in recent time by green screens. Still it does
not seem to have suffered much from light during these four decades; at
least two former officers of the library, who were appointed one in
1828 and the other in 1834, affirm that at that time the colors were not
notably fresher than now. This remark is important, because the
coloring in Humboldt, as well as in Lord Kingsborough, by its
freshness gives a wrong impression of the coloring of the original,
which in fact is but feeble; it