This Codex corresponds in size, appearance, and manner of folding to the descriptions of the Maya books which I have presented above from Spanish sources. It has thirty-nine leaves, thirty-five of which are colored and inscribed on both sides, and four on one side only, so that there are only seventy-four pages of matter. The total length of the sheet is 3.6 meters, and the height of each page is 0.295 meter, the width 0.085 meter.
The first publication of any portion of this Codex was by Alexander von Humboldt, who had five pages of it copied for his work, Vues des Cordillères et Monumens des Peuples Indigènes de l'Amerique, issued at Paris in 1813 (not 1810, as the title-page has it). It was next very carefully copied in full by the Italian artist, Agostino Aglio, for the third volume of Lord Kingsborough's great work on Mexican Antiquities, the first volume of which appeared in 1831.
From Kingsborough's work a few pages of the Codex have been from time to time republished in other books, which call for no special mention.
Two pages were copied from the original in 1855, and appeared in Wuttke's Geschichte der Schrift, Leipzig, 1872.
Finally, in 1880, the whole was very admirably chromo-photographed by A. Naumann's establishment at Leipzig to the number of fifty copies, forty of which were placed on sale. It is the first work which was ever published in chromo-photography, and has, therefore, a high scientific as well as antiquarian interest.
The editor was Dr. E. Förstemann, aulic counselor and librarian-in-chief of the Royal Library. He wrote an introduction (17 pp. 4to) giving a history of the manuscript, and bibliographical and other notes upon it of much value. One opinion he defends must not be passed by in silence. It is that the Dresden Codex is not one but parts of two original manuscripts written by different hands.
It appears that it has always been in two unequal fragments, which all previous writers have attributed to an accidental injury to the original. Dr. Förstemann gives a number of reasons for believing that this is not the correct explanation, but that we have here portions of two different books, having general similarity but also many points of diversity.
This separation led to an erroneous (or perhaps erroneous) sequence of
