I first learned about the Mayan Rabbit Scribe in 2000 when my husband and I traveled to Guatemala to explore the Tikal ruins. I had been to various places in the past, including Chichén-Itzá, Tulum and Cobá because I have been fascinated by the Mayan culture since I was a child. Maybe I even manifested these trips to Mayan temples as a teenager while coloring pictures in a Mayan-Inca-Aztec coloring book I bought at a thrift store.
The amount of information you can find about Mayan culture online or at your local library pales in comparison to the facts and lore you hear from on-site tour guides.
While visiting Tikal, I learned that the Maya had kept journals of their history and culture, called “codices,” most of which were destroyed on the orders of a Spanish father, Father Diego de Landa, in a huge bonfire in a town in the center of Yucatan called Mani. . The father believed that the books were the work of the devil and were preventing the Maya from becoming truly civilized. On his order, anyone caught with a codex was summarily tortured or killed. Only four codices (some of them partial) have survived.
For generations, as stelae and other stone carvings of the Maya disintegrated, no one could understand what the carvings meant, and an entire culture was about to be submerged by the tides of history until a few archaeologists uncovered the mysteries. of the glyphs.
I met a couple of archaeologists who had come to Tikal to photograph artifacts and carvings. They had dedicated their lives to understanding the Mayan way of life. One, by the name of Eleanor “Bunny” Coates, had been visiting Maya sites for many years. She told me about Rabbit Scribe.
I approached that entity directly, since I am a writer myself and I know what it is like to be the documentary filmmaker of the family. I know how important the writer, albeit unrecognized, is in any movie or video production you see. Without the writer, nothing is written! Without the writer, the memory of an event or series of events loses detail and soon fades into obscurity.
The scribe rabbit first appears as part of a scene on a painted Classic Maya vase (circa AD 300-900), which may have been used to serve a chocolate drink. Scribes carried out the important task of recording important royal events using a phonetically based hieroglyphic script. These scribe rabbits appeared on murals and vases, usually writing in a fan-shaped folding book, or “codex,” that was covered with jaguar skin. Writing was very important to the Maya and they recorded important events on everything: walls, stairs, sculptures, ceramics, plates, and stone.
Fortunately, Father Diego de Landa’s plan to completely destroy the written history of Classic Maya culture has been thwarted by diligent archaeologists who, over the past few decades, have been able to decipher many of the Maya glyphs. Dr. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin has been a leading force in shedding light on the meaning and impact of Mayan culture, and continues to move forward with his fascinating work.
