Sacred narrative of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, tracing the gods' creation of the world, their failed attempts with mud and wood, and the final fashioning of humans from maize. Its dramatic center is the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who descend into the underworld of Xibalba and outwit its lords of death. The original hieroglyphic tradition is lost; the text survived because K'iche' authors wrote it in their language using the Latin alphabet around the 1550s, and a Spanish friar, Francisco Ximénez, copied it around 1701. It remains a living sacred narrative for K'iche' Maya communities.
Spanish friars burned the painted books of the Maya as the work of the devil. Almost none survived. The Popol Vuh, the sacred book of creation of the K'iche' Maya, lived only because of a strange reversal. Around the 1550s, K'iche' writers set their holy narrative down in their own language, using the very Latin alphabet the friars had taught them. A century and a half later a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez found that manuscript, copied it, and added a Spanish translation. The original is gone. The friar's copy is the reason we can still read how the gods made the first people out of maize, and how the Hero Twins outwitted the lords of death. The book that the conquest tried to erase outlived the conquest.