One of the worldwide three existing mayan codices (plus the Grolier fragment) to survive the book burnings by the Spanish clergy in 1521 turned up in Dresden in 1739. How it got to Vienna, where Johann Christian Goetze, director of the Royal Library at the court of Saxony purchased it from a private owner, is unknown, but it was probably sent by Hernán Cortés as a tribute to the king of Spain, who was also the king of Austria during the Conquest.
The Dresden Codex is considered the most beautiful and complete. It is made from Amatl paper( "kopó", tree bark that has been flattened and covered with a lime paste) , folded accordion-style and written and painted on both sides. It totals 74 pages in length, painted with extraordinary care and clarity using a very fine brush. The artist used both sides of all but four of the pages of the codices. Its basic colors are red, black and the so-called Mayan blue.
The codex was written by eight different scribes, each with their own distinctive style, type of glyphs and subject matter. It is linked to the Yucatecan Maya in Chichén Itzá, the extraordinary ancient Mayan city situated in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula. It was made between A.D. 1200-1250, and was still possibly in use when the conquistadors arrived. The "Codex Dresdensis" as one of the few pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphic writings (most of them on stelas found in Palenque, one of the ancient cities of Yucatán) contains ast