The Books of Chilan Balam

The Books of Chilan Balam, subtitled The Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan, is a book by Daniel G. Brinton. The prefatory note says the substance of the present pamphlet was presented as an address to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, at its meeting in January, 1882, and was printed in the Penn Monthly, March, 1882. The text cites the earliest missionaries as evidence that one people alone, of all the natives of the New World, possessed a literature written in "letters and characters", preserved in volumes neatly bound.

The text says a few of these books still remain, preserved to us by accident in the great European libraries, but most of them were destroyed by the monks. The text says their contents were found to relate chiefly to the pagan ritual, to traditions of the heathen times, to astrological superstitions, and the like. The text says each of these books bore the same name, and that in whatever village it was written, or by whatever hand, it always was, and to-day still is, called The Book of Chilan Balam.