>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> John Hessler: Good afternoon, everyone. I want to welcome all of you to the Kluge Center. Many of you are Kluge scholars so you don't have to be welcomed to the Kluge Center, you're already at the Kluge Center. But this is for the Kislak Fellowship Annual Lecture. This year's fellow was Frauke Sachse. She is the professor of Mesoamerican Studies at the University of Bonn. But she's a lot more than that. The description, professor of Mesoamerican Studies doesn't really go far enough. Frauke, at least in my estimation, is one of the premiere linguists working in the world right now on a small group of languages, many of them that are endangered. Her dissertation focused on a particular language called Szinca. It is an extremely endangered language that only a few people in the world have worked on. Frauke used 18th century grammars in order to reconstruct what that language looked like, how it was spoken. She spent many years in the field doing field work to mixed success, being there were few speakers who actually could speak the language. Since her dissertation, she's continued work on that, but she has also focused on other Mesoamerican languages. The area that we are talking about, which is this small area in Central America, is one of the most linguistically dense in the world. Just in the Maya languages alone, depending on who you talk to, there are anywhere from 30 to 36 languages that are currently spoken. She's going to speak to us today about her Kislak project, which she's also working on with another researcher whose name is Gary Sparks who's also in the audience, about a manuscript that is pretty much pretty unknown in the Mesoamerican Studies world. And Frauke and Gary have made extreme inroads into discovering what may turn out to be one of the most important manuscripts in the Kislak collection. So without further ado, Frauke. >> Frauke Sachse: Thank you very much, John. It was a very kind, far too kind, introduction. I hardly recognize myself. I would like to start this with a couple of thanks. Thanks, first, to the Kluge Center, the Kislak Foundation, for wanting me with this fellowship. I would like to thank my recommenders Nancy Ferris and Kris Lorne-Trexloff [phonetic] for helping me get this fellowship. I would like to thank the staff of the Kluge Center, in particular Mary Lou Reker and Travis Hensley have been tremendously helpful and full of support and assistance. I would like to thank you, John, for your great support and assistance during this research. And the entire staff of the geography and maps department. As you already said, the project is not my own project. It's a project that I'm doing together with Gary Sparks from George Mason University. So all the work and all the results I'm going to talk about today are collaborative. This is not only my achievement, this is our joint achievement. So I'm, we are working on this manuscript in the Kislak collection for which I received this wonderful fellowship and Gary has been able to do this research based on any-age funding. So we are both tremendously grateful for the support. The plans, what we have plans for, various publications which are coming out of this research that we're currently doing and I'm going to tell you a little bit about this today. For once, we hope that we can produce an edition of the entire document that is in the Library of Congress, a proposal for this is currently under revision here at the publications department and of course we are very, very hopeful that this is going to be seen as an interesting project and maybe get some support. So, what are we talking about here? Why is this not working. Can somebody help me? ^M00:04:36 ^M00:04:43 It's not working. That one? >> Yeah. >> Frauke Sachse: Ah, okay. So, we are talking about a 16th century manuscript, it's a hand book, that was used by a missionary in highland Guatemala. And these kinds of handbooks were called [foreign term], "go with me," a little like what we have today is a Moleskine handbook, a little handbook that contained various doctrinal texts and other documents and textual materials that were relevant to this particular missionary for his missionary efforts. And it's particularly interesting because it contains a collection of different texts and different Mayan languages from highland Guatemala. I would like to give you a little bit of background information. Highland Guatemala is the world's second region, or the second major region, that was conquered by the Spanish on the American continent in 1554. The K'iche' speaking kingdom of Utatlan was the main power in this ethnically and linguistically very diverse Maya highland region and as John has pointed out already, there are many different Mayan languages that are still spoken today and just in Guatemala in this region we have 21 Mayan languages that are spoken to this very day. So one-third of the Guatemalan population today speaks a Mayan language, something that is not very well-known. From the beginning, Christian-ization, the mission, the conversion to the Christian faith, took place in the indigenous languages. And a particular role was played by Bartolome de las Casas, the so-called "Defender of the Indians," who ended the bloodshed of the conquest, which was particularly violent in highland Guatemala, by replacing the sword with the gospel and successfully pacifying the resisting providence of Tezoatlan, by reaching to the indigenous population in their own language. Guatemala is therefore one of the best areas to study the encounter between pre-Colombian and European religions and word systems, because there was so much missionary documentation and so much material that was produced by these missionaries in these indigenous languages. And mostly, for the most part, this material has been neglected by researchers and there's now a small group of people, more and more research of linguist theologians, historians, becoming more and more interested in doing work with these missionary text documents in indigenous languages. And the Kislak manuscript 1015 is one of the earliest specimens of such missionary or doctrinic text documents. It is, as I already said, a compilation of various texts and different highland Mayan languages. And all of these texts in this manuscript are copies of even earlier originals that were copied or compiled and then newly bound for the purpose of this particular missionary. Some pages were also deleted by the binding, after the new binding, and we can also see that some pages were cut out by whoever was using that document. We see a picture of a cut out page. But we cannot say very much about the binding and the paper yet other than we know it's all 16th century because the analysis of the paper and the watermarks are something that is currently being undertaken by the conversation division of the Library of Congress and we are looking forward to getting these results. So the document, or the manuscript, consists of various texts by different scribes and copiers. We can define different hands, you can see them here numbered from A to F. The compilation of the texts is rather eclectic, one must say. They are of very diverse origin and of particular interest to us as Mesoamericanists, are various sections of Mayan numerals or numbers, lists of numbers, there are also sections of Latin numerals. There are prayers in Latin as well as catechisms in K'iche' and in Kaqchikel. And the core texts include several sections done by the same copiers or by the same hand, which is hand number F, which include the text "Cosas de la Fe Catholica," or in English, "Things of the Catholic Faith," a text labeled [foreign term], which is K'iche' for "Music." And another section which is called "Sermones," or "Sermons." There are further texts that are also done by that same copyist, which is texts for the prerequisites of marriage, a list of contents of the proceeding texts in the core texts section, and further marriage prescriptions and taboos, I will come to that later because that section's particularly interesting. ^M00:10:40 So what have we done so far with this manuscript? In the fall, we produced a full transcription of the entire book. Which now amounts to, the entire book itself, has 100 folios written on both sides and in the transcription, that amounts to 150 pages, Times New Roman, 10 point, single-spaced. So it's a lot of text that we are going through. It's all in these indigenous Mayan languages, so we have a lot of translation work ahead of us. We are now working on the textual analysis of these sections and are in the process of preparing several publications. Besides the manuscript edition that we would like to do, we are planning a detailed translation of this core section on the "Cosas de la Fe Catholica," which I will talk about in more detail today. And we are working on an article about the numbers section and the marriage rules, which are also topics that I will be talking about. Let's look at dating the volume, how old is this really? It's a bit tricky. The document, I mean the handbook, itself is clearly 16th century, the handwriting is 16th century, the binding is 16th century. So far, that' clear. There are two references in the handbook to a compilation date of 1567. The core section includes, core section of this "Songs" that I will be talking about, ends in a colophon. And the text preceding this colophon indicates that the copyist or scribe completed the copy on the 23rd of July in 1567 in the Valle de Panchoy, which is today Antigua, Guatemala. And this particular date of 1567 is repeated further below in this colophon. The colophon itself references the date 1555, which may be a reference to the date of the original from which the scribe copied. And a bit more enigmatic is the reference to 1544, "the fathers arrived," and 1552, "the book was completed." We are not quite sure what these references really refer to, we are also not quite sure whether we are reading it correctly because these texts are spelled with abbreviations. So we're still studying this section and don't really know whether these earlier dates might actually refer to an original compilation date. So let's look at these various sections of the handbook. I talked about these Mayan numbers. What's really special about the Kislak manuscript is that it has a unique list of written Mayan numbers which goes from 1 to 70 million. And although we have sections on Mayan numbers in other dictionaries and grammars on highland Mayan languages, none of these go that high. We've never seen something going up that high. We could identify the language, these numbers are written in Ixil. This is also very remarkable because there's no other document to our knowledge from the Colonian era that is written in Ixil, so this may be the only document in Ixil language, certainly from the 16th century if not in general. The analysis of the numbers section is really interesting as it provides us with a very detailed example of how counting works not only in Ixil but also in other highland Mayan languages and this is also of general language for Mesoamerican Studies because we do understand the numbers system, the arithmetics of Mesoamerica quite well. There has been, a lot of research has been done in particular on classic Maya culture, we have here a picture of one page of the codex, here's one of the four surviving Mayan books from the pre-Colombian time, which is written in Maya hieroglyphic writing and full of calendrical information and then astronomical information. And we know since the very, since the 19th century, researchers like [inaudible] and then in the 20th century in particular, Sir Ed Thompson and also Floyd Lounsbury have produced tremendous detailed information and analysis on how calendrics and mathematics were in the classic Maya system. So we do understand that quite well and I will give you a slide for an introduction into this. Maya accounting is based on a vigesimal system. Vigesimal is based on the number 20. So our decimal system that we are used to, as we all know, is based on the number 10. So you count in different steps of, that are all multiplied by 10. So one times 10 is 10, times 10 is 100, times 10 is 1,000 and these different cycles are labeled with names like a decade, a century, a millennium. And we notate this and place notation so when you see the number 1,983, this means it's three times 10, it's nine times 100, and one times 1000. And in the vigesimal system, that works basically the same way, it's just the basis is 20. So you start with one and you take that times 20 is 20, times 20 is 400, times 20 is 8,000 times 20 is 160,000 times 20 is 3 million 200,000. And each of these cycles in Mayan languages has their own name like we have decades and centuries and millennium. And... These names for these cycles we do find in this Ixil document. So we have special terms for the numbers 20, which is "vinac," for the numbers 80, which is "much-ul," for the numbers 400, "o-much," which is really interesting here because the form itself only occurs with higher numbers. So we do find in the text here under 800, and I don't have a pointer, do I? No. Oh, I do, okay. Does that show? Okay. So 800 is basically written as two times 400, 400 itself doesn't occur as one times 400, it just occurs as four times 80. So it's a very interact counting system here. We also have terms for the cycles of 8,000, "chuiul," 160,000, "calab," and 3 million 200,000, "tiche." The Kislak manuscript is very special in giving examples for very complex high numbers as you can see on this manuscript page. For example, we have numbers like 369,000, 381,000. When we were looking at this at first, we had doubts whether this was really a true Mayan numbers system or whether this may have been a scribe, a missionary trying to translate European numbers into Ixil. But we have analyzed it and we find that it is indeed a full Maya vigesimal counting system which functions the same way as the classic Maya system does. So as an example, the number 357,000 is written out as "o-chuk-ul t-ox-la-oqob t-o-chuy t-ox-kalab." And that translates into five times 40 into the cycle of 14 times 400 into the cycle of five times 8,000 into the cycle of three times 160,000 which is the same as 200 plus 4,800 plus 32,000 plus 320,000 which amounts to 357,000. It is a bit complicated and students of Maya studies, Mesoamerican studies [inaudible] a mess to get through this. So I apologize for this being a bit tedious in this talk. ^M00:20:45 But just to give you an idea what we're dealing with here, we have to be a bit mathematical. And we are currently wrapping up the results of our analysis into an article and hope that we get this written and published very, very soon. The next section is a bit more easy to grasp. Gary and I are also working on this at high speed at the moment. It's the section that regards marriage prescription rules. Very interesting. You have several pages at the end of the manuscript which have these drawings of these circles with names in them and explanations. And we first thought that these were genealogies. Because the form of representation corresponds with what you find in Renaissance Spanish or also, up until the 19th century in Spain, as family trees. This is the way, how these things are presented. However, when we were translating the associated K'iche' texts, it was revealed that we are not dealing with genealogies, but with hypothetical or exemplary drafts of kinship relations and accompanying explanations of what in Christian or Spanish thought would be understood as an illegitimate or a legitimate sexual relation or marriage taboos and their respective impact on legal inheritance. To give you an example, this is basically an easier visualized... illustration of what we find in the original manuscript. So let me translate that for you. "If Pedro has some illegitimate relation with Maria," which means, is spelled here in K'iche' as "rach ajmak," "He is the companion of the sinner," so he's a sinner, that implicates that this is an illegitimate sexual relationship. "If that is the case, then Pedro must not marry either Maria's daughter or her mother or her grandmother," which is to European eyes, bizarre. Why would somebody want to marry the grandmother of a concubine? It also says that, "Maria must not marry Pedro's son." So that's also forbidden. Pedro's son, however, may marry Maria's daughter or her granddaughter. So what we are thinking we are dealing with here is that these were drafts that were used to teach the local population about understandings of legitimate marriage and inheritance rules in Christian European society which was the new cultural system which was implemented by the conquistadors and missionaries. It may also reveal, the section may also reveal indirect clues about what was cultural practice in highland Guatemala because obviously the missionaries saw a need in making people understand that they couldn't marry their mother or their grandmother. Which at first appears bizarre, but it may not be that bizarre at all because very often marriage doesn't have anything to do with sexual relations but with making sure that somebody survives and maintaining and feeding somebody. So in other cultures this, the concept of marriage, has different implications. So we are working on that and we are also drafting an article on this, so you see there's a lot of research that comes out of this particular document. But now finally to the text that is really the focus of this talk, and which is the oldest part of the compilation of the [foreign term] which dates to at least 1555. And this text includes songs or hymns and is the reason why I gave this talk the title that I chose, "Songs of Faith and Devotion" because it's really about these songs. They make a big section of the manuscript. So let's look at this. The Spanish heading in the original text reads, "Beginning of the succession of things regarding the Catholic faith from the beginning to the end in form of hymns or songs so that the Indians would sing them in their festivals or holidays." The following paragraph in K'iche' specifies that the text is a "chanalibal vuh bixabal," "...is a cantation book, and a bishop," a "vuh" or a songbook, "Which serves the purpose of narrating the word of God in form of songs that shall be sung at the annual Christian holidays." If we look at the contents of this text, the text spans from 17 recto to 59 recto, so that's more than 44 years with very tiny writing, as you can see here. It comprises a total of 50 chapters and an additional 12 hymns. And Gary was suggesting that that may be related, that 50 chapters might be related to the weeks of the year, that it is songs that are sung in each week of the year. Though we're still working on establishing that that is really the case. Each section has a title, or each chapter has a title or a heading, which is in Spanish. But the texts and the songs are in K'iche'. The chapters of variable length. So some are just half a page and others are several pages long. They're divided into stanzas, which you can see here in the image. Which are marked by a colonial-style paragraph sign, yeah. Which divides the different stanzas. And to give you an example for the stanzas, we have now put them into a more rhythmic pattern. I read the first one in English, "The truth I shall remember and the faithfulness I shall tell," and then literally, "Much evil I feel for the fabricated word," which is very metaphorical in K'iche' means as much as, "I despise the lie." There are no indications that these stanzas are following any kind of old world model of rhyme or metric system. However, when you look at the next stanza, "Oh, much I despise that was lost the truth of being, great is my tremble, my lament, because it was lost the truth of being." You can see that, you can see in this reputation here, the "Great is my tremble, my lament," "nim nucic, nim voeqel," that the author follows Maya poetics by using couplets or parallelisms and in this case, this particular phrase, which is something that we know from ingenious language documents by Mayan authors, and is a pattern which is very well-known from the "Theologia Indorum" by Domingo de Vico about which I will say something in a few seconds. If we look at the contents of the chapters with their many stanzas, we find detailed treaties of ethical narratives including Genesis, the fall of man, the banishment from paradise, the division of language at Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of Moses, saint stories, and of course the life of Jesus from his birth to the passion, including all miracles and it's very detailed. ^M00:30:14 Based on the terminology that is used in the text, we can attribute authorship clearly to the Dominican Order or the Order of Preachers. As I have shown, doctrinal texts produced by Dominicans in highland Guatemala systematically adopt terminology from highland Maya ritual language, while Franciscan and other authors prefer to introduce their own words from Latin and create neologisms or new terms. There are certain key terms that are indicative for 16th century Dominican doctrinal literature in Guatemala. And these terms have today been primarily associated with Domingo de Vico's "Theologia Indorum." And this is where I have to mention another project that is going on at the moment and is parallel to the work that Gary and I are doing here on the Kislak manuscript. Which is a project that is led by Gary Sparks who actually is the utmost authority on the "Theologia Indorum" and Domingo de Vico in the world, I would say. It's a project which is headed and led by him on the translation of this particular document. And I'm happy to be part of this project. The "Theologia Indorum" was the first theology of the Americas that was entirely written in K'iche'. It comprises two volumes of 700 folios. It's a very abundant source and summarizes all basics of the Christian faith written for K'iche' speaking audience. And this Domingo de Vico incorporated a lot of terminology and concepts from pre-Colombian religion to make the Christian concepts understood to the K'iche' speakers. And some of these terms that we find in the "Theologia Indorum" and that have been identified in Gary's research, we now also find in the Kislak manuscript, which makes this Kislak source very, very interesting for us because we think it is earlier than the "Theologia Indorum" and that changes the picture a little bit. So terms that are referenced for example are that the Christian god is referred to as "Tz'aqol B'itol," the framer and the former, which is a reference to a Mayan creator god that also occurs in indigenous documents. And he's referred to as "Dios nim Ajaw," the great lord, which is a term that according to the "Apologetica Historia" by Bartolome de las Casas, was used before the arrival of the Spanish to refer to the most powerful creator deity. It's, what's particularly fascinating is something that Gary pointed out in his research, that the Christian god is referred to as "our mother and our father," which is a very Mayan concept. Christian, we all know in Christianity, god is male. Yeah? God is not female. In Maya thought it is both, yeah, it is female and male. And the female is always referenced first. Another concept which I have done some work on is the concept of "q'anal raxal," the abandons, the green, the yellowness and the greenness, which refers to abandons from a rich maize harvest and is a topic or a concept that is used in Maya religion, Maya ritual terminology. And it is here used in order to refer to the glory of the Christian god. So there are several indications here that we are dealing with a Dominican source because these are terms that are indicative of Dominican translation practices. With respect to the Dominican origin of the text, it is also interesting to note that the scribe uses very unconventional and not otherwise used orthographic forms and letters to represent the sounds of the K'iche' phonetic system that are not part of the Spanish or the Latin alphabet. He does not follow conventions that are used by other missionaries and that have been established by the Franciscan, Francisco de la Parra, which you see in the box down here below. Francisco de la Parra defined that the [inaudible] "k'" would be represented by the sign "4." And the [inaudible] "q " by what we call "k," and the [inaudible] "q'" by the turned around 3, or the [foreign term]. And our scribe here uses completely different conventions to represent these sounds. Which we interpret a little bit as maybe that Dominicans were also in these texts and were competing with the Franciscan missionaries because this really in the very early stages of when these conventions were defined and that they said, "We are not going to follow Franciscan conventions, we are doing our own orthographic style." So this is from that point of view paleographically a very interesting source as well. The strongest connection to Dominican authorship however comes from the contents of the text. In 1619, the Dominican chronicler Antonio Remesal gives an account of the peace for conquest of Tezoatlan by Casas and his group of friars that I mentioned before. Tezoatlan, in today's K'iche' speaking region of Guatemala, had resisted the Spanish invasion well into the 1530's. And las Casas, when he heard that there was another attempt to conquer this region by military force, he requested and received permission from the crown to conquer this region by mission rather than by sword and thereby end the terrible bloodshed that had occurred in highland Guatemala. For this purpose, las Casas recruited a team of [inaudible] and linguistically versatile Dominicans, who dedicated themselves at writing doctrinal texts for the mission in the ingenious languages of the region. And text in Remesal reads as follows, "The friars were the friar father Bartolome de las Casas, father Rodrigo de Ladrada, and friar Pedro de Angulo and friar Luys Cancer. All of them knew the language of the province of Guatemala, which includes all of Quiche and Zacualpa very well. And among them, they wrote some strophes, or verses, in a manner permitted by the language with their consonants and rhythms. And in these they describe the creation of the world, the fall of man, his banishment from paradise. They included all the life and miracles of Christ our lord, his passion, his death, his resurrection, his ascension to heaven, and when his second time will come again to judge mankind and the end of his coming, which is the punishment of those who are evil and reward for those who are good. This work was a very long work and as such, they divided it by pauses and different verses in the style of the Spanish ones, which as these were the first to be made in the language of the Indians, deserve not to be forgotten for the many more that were written later." To summarize what Remesal says, these writings were the first translation of the Christian doctrine into the language of Guatemala by Dominicans. It was a very comprehensive and long work in form of songs that were divided in strophes or stanzas and, and this is the most significant, the contents correspond one-on-one, including the order, with the contents of the text in the Kislak manuscript. So what does Remesal tell us about what happens with these songs and these stanzas? They were written, what happened with them? He goes on and he writes that las Casas found four indigenous merchants who traveled to Tezoatlan on a regular basis and were known to the local lot. And Remesal writes that with care, the friars taught these four merchants, who had already converted to Christianity, how to sing these "coplas," or verses. Las Casas then sent the merchants to Tezoatlan to sing the songs of Christianity to the people and their [foreign term], or lord. And Remesal writes, "The merchants sang and preached and all the people came to hear the coplas. Almost for eight days they were singing about the creation of the world, about the fall of man, about the incarnation of Christ, about the resurrection of Lazarus, the merchants tried to sing a lot." ^M00:40:16 The songs and the music excited the population of Tezoatlan and the local lord and they asked the merchants to explain the contents of the songs. These then asked the lord to invite the friars to explain to them the contents of the faith. The first friar who went to do this was mentioned, friar Luys Cancer, who went to Tezoatlan and sang and preached. And then as a result, the lord converted to Christianity and he signed a peace treaty with the Spanish crown. The province did not have to pay any tribute or tax for several years for accepting the king of Spain. So that is basically the story of the peaceful conquest as told by Remesal. Now you're already guessing it, is that Gary and I assume that the text in the Kislak manuscript is a copy of these very coplas that are mentioned by Remesal. Which is exciting on its own. But it's getting more complicated. Because there's another manuscript that has been identified as the very text referred to in Remesal. And this is this one here from the Newberry Library in Chicago, which Basu [phonetic] suggested to be this very coplas manuscript that was written in Q'eqchi', the language of the region that was missionized by las Casas and Cancer, and contains those songs that were mentioned in the Remesal. So at first, we thought there's a problem here. But when we looked at this in more detail, we found that Basu is right. Because we found that the Q'eqchi' coplas that Basu wrote about and the text in the Kislak manuscript are two versions of the same text, one in Q'eqchi' and one in K'iche'. And if we compare these two texts, we can see that the Q'eqchi' text is a bit more concise and a bit more abstract but in terms of contents, both texts are identical. Comparing it in more detail, we see that the Kislak text is far more comprehensive and includes chapters and hymns that are missing in the manuscript from Chicago. And in addition, the individual chapters in the Kislak manuscript include more stanzas and are much more detailed in the K'iche' manuscript than in the Q'eqchi' manuscript. So this suggests the following. We believe that we have re-discovered the very coplas that were mentioned in Remesal in their original language and we think it is K'iche'. And thereby, we may have identified the earliest doctrinal text from highland Guatemala that may originally go back as far as into the 1530's, when las Casas began his mission in the Verapaz. So this document is in the Library of Congress, it's a treasure here. And with this, I would like to thank you for your attention and I'm happy to take questions. ^M00:43:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:44:00 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:44:08 That's a good question. I know it was acquired by Arthur Dunkelman [phonetic] on behalf of Jay Kislak for the Kislak collection where it was originally was where Arthur Dunkelman acquired it and under which conditions I don't know. ^M00:44:28 ^M00:44:37 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:45:23 Yeah, the missionaries were really taking a lot of care in thinking about which terminology to use. And when we compare the doctrinal literature that we have from highland Guatemala, we see that it's not standardized at all. It's very eclectic. Missionaries from different orders use different translation techniques and different strategies. And what we can see is that there are particular differences between Franciscans and Dominicans. Franciscans prefer to use neologisms, so the prime example for this is that they refuse to re-use any kind of indigenous term for labeling god. They would introduce the Spanish term "dios." And maybe change that to the Mayan sound system a little bit so it sounds like "kiosh." Yeah, but they would not introduce any indigenous terminology, which is something that the Dominicans did. And they did that very deliberately. And we can see that also in documents from other Dominican or areas in which the Dominicans had a lot of missionary activity like in Quechua documents from the Andes. Anna Dorsen [phonetic] has written about those in quite a detailed way. And yeah, we have very different approaches here. The Dominicans, this is what makes the Dominican materials interesting. And this is what makes highland Guatemala a very interesting place for researching the mission and the production or the creation of Christian terminology and Christian concepts in Mayan languages because we have these two regions, we have the K'iche' speaking region and we have the Kaqchikel speaking region, two languages which are very similar but the Kaqchikel region was mostly dominated by Franciscan missionaries and the K'iche' region by Dominicans. And they have very different approaches to translation. And you see in the Dominican material all this re-use of terminology and Gary has written quite extensively about the re-use of couplets and parallelism. So Domingo de Vico is someone who has adopted the ritual language that was used in highland Guatemala, and is used to the present day, Mayan ceremonial specialists use a specific form of ceremonial discourse which has a lot of parallelisms and couplet structure and this very couplet structure you find in these Dominican documents. And as I have to reference this to Gary, I mean this is his work. Just [inaudible]. ^M00:48:30 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:48:50 I don't believe so. I think, I don't where this is, I must honestly say I must blank on this. I don't know whether this was a strategy that missionaries had tried in other parts of the world before. But it was certainly very successful and had a good effect because Remesal writes in much detail, I mean I've given you a very short account of this very detailed and colorful description that he has, about how the people really loved these songs and loved this music and the harmonies and wanted to learn how to sing those. And they love the outfit of the Dominican friars with their shaved heads and their black and white gowns, which were interesting. It was just exotic, it was something interesting. And that probably did have the mission, if you were confronted with something that you find exciting, you're probably also interested in learning more about it so I think it was a very successful strategy. Wherever it came from, I don't know whether it has been applied before. ^M00:50:07 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:50:50 I think this text was solely compiled for the missionary himself. We have originally called him the highland Maya priest, but we don't do this anymore because we don't really know whether it was really used by a priest or by a missionary of some other order. But it was certainly something that somebody, I mean, because we have several texts, eclectic different texts, that were copied by the same hand. So there was somebody in the convent who probably sat down and either copied this for himself or had it copied for someone to be used in the field, to be used on his mission. He probably carried this book with him and these songs were, likely these songs, these original songs that were drafted, and they had been sung, they had been sung all over the highlands. They were a part of the general-- oh, I'm sorry-- of the general law that was produced in order to missionize and preach the gospel. And every missionary who came into highland Guatemala probably wanted to know these songs and thereby wanted a copy of it. So this copy was probably primarily for the missionary so that he would have this in writing, since also all the missionaries who came from Spain, they had to learn the languages. They came, they knew Spanish and they obviously knew Latin and maybe Greek, but they did not know the highland Mayan languages. So they came and they first learned the languages and these handbooks with all this material helped them to learn and to memorize these songs and sing them to the people who could then repeat them. ^M00:52:43 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:53:00 Yeah, the region of Tezoutlan was really fierce. The people there really resisted the conquest and the Spanish and it took several attempts to defeat this region and always never succeeded. But the conquests in the rest of the regions had been so bloody, that there was, in particular from Bartolome de las Casas and other missionaries, a lot of resistance to this. And I think the choice to use merchants was a pragmatic one. Because these were the only people who could get in there. I guess that the people in Tezoutlan were so defensive the only people who they would let in were probably the merchants who came from other provinces and knew the languages and brought in products from other highland Mayan areas that were not necessarily controlled by the Spanish. ^M00:54:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:14 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.