stant contact among groups which "promot[ed] cross-fertilisation that cut across differences of language and culture." Within the lowland region Yucatecan and Cholan had approximately the same degree of similarity as Spanish and Italian have today. This led to extensive trade and cultural exchange and a shared Mayan identity evolved. Like the Greek city-states they competed fiercely among themselves but they also presented a "unified ethnic identity to outsiders."
By the time the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century the culture had declined to the point where a monk, Lorenzo de Bienvenida, saw the Maya ruins and described them as the finest of "all the discoveries in the Indies" but did not connect them with the far simpler Mayan society he saw around him. Another Spaniard, Bishop Diego de Landa, worked out the fact that ancestors of this same people had built the impressive structures that were now half-buried in the jungles. Unfortunately Landa was also "a severe and narrow-minded man" who burned most of the Maya codices because they contained, he said, the signs of the devil. The Maya, Landa noted, "regretted [this] to an amazing degree." But Landa, Bienvenida and others were also "accomplished scholars" who wrote "first-class anthropological accounts of native culture." Landa even interviewed learned Mayas and left behind a description of the Maya calendar and his so-called alphabet of Mayan writing.
De Landa's treatise was hidden away in a library, as were the four Maya codices that survived his Christian in
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