History and Provenance

The Popol Vuh recounts the creation of the world, the deeds of the Hero Twins against the lords of the underworld, and the origin and genealogy of the Kiche ruling lineages, and it is the fullest surviving Maya mythological narrative. Ximenez's manuscript left Guatemala in the nineteenth century: the Abbe Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg reported acquiring it in 1855, and after his death it passed through the collector Alphonse Pinart and the Paris bookseller Charles Leclerc to the American collector Edward E. Ayer, who bought it in 1887. Ayer gave it to the Newberry Library, where it has been since 1912, bound together with other works by Ximenez.

Ximenez's manuscript, known as the Ayer Manuscript after the American collector Edward Ayer who acquired it, passed through several hands after leaving Guatemala before reaching the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it remains today as the primary surviving witness to the text. Because Ximenez himself was working from an already-lost Kʼicheʼ source of uncertain age and completeness, the relationship between his early eighteenth-century transcription and whatever earlier oral or written Kʼicheʼ tradition it drew on is a matter for textual and historical inference rather than direct verification, though the narrative's content shows clear continuity with imagery attested independently in Classic-period Maya art centuries earlier.