Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is a foundational narrative of the Kiche Maya people of highland Guatemala, preserved for centuries through oral tradition before being set down in written Kiche using the Latin alphabet around 1550, in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest. Its oldest surviving copy is an early eighteenth-century manuscript made around 1701 by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez, who transcribed the Kiche text alongside his own Spanish translation in parallel columns, and it is through this copy that the work survives at all. The text opens with an account of the gods' repeated, failed attempts to create human beings, first from mud and then from wood, before succeeding with people formed from maize, and continues with the adventures of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who outwit the lords of the underworld Xibalba, before concluding with a dynastic history of the Kiche people down to the Spanish conquest. Because Spanish missionaries and conquistadors destroyed the vast majority of Mesoamerican written texts, the Popol Vuh survives as one of the fullest and most literarily developed accounts of pre-Columbian mythology and cosmology to reach the present day. Declared part of Guatemala's intangible cultural heritage in 2012, it remains central to Kiche identity and to the study of indigenous American literature.