Popol Vuh — The Book of Creation

Before there was land, there was only the sea, the sky, and the silence. Then the Maker and Modeler spoke, and the world came into being. The Popol Vuh is the K'iche' Maya book of creation — the origin story of humanity, the account of the Hero Twins, the trials of Xibalba, and the emergence of the first humans from maize. It was written down in the 16th century by a Maya scholar who feared the knowledge would be lost to Spanish colonization. It nearly was. The single surviving copy was discovered by a Dominican friar in a highland Guatemala church in the 1700s. It is the closest thing the Americas have to a creation epic as old and as complete as the Bible.

These signs carry the first words of creation, the maize god, and the story that survived everything the conquest tried to destroy.