"Their legends came from the books they burned"

SUMMARY"Their legends came from the books they burned" (Nov 6, 2026; Tito: "i think their legends came from the books they 'burned'")

LENS (Tito)the Old World legends were built from the land's books, which were burned or carried off. RECORD, the destruction: Itzcoatl ordered the old pictorial histories burned (about 1430, Florentine Codex), the land's own rulers overwriting before Spain; Landa's auto de fe at Maní (July 12, 1562), 27 codices by his own count and about 5,000 images, with other sources saying far more; Sahagún's manuscripts confiscated by the Church and Crown (royal order of 1577) and the finished work sent to Europe, where it sits in the Medici library in Florence. RECORD, the taking: almost every surviving book of the land lives in Europe. The Dresden Codex was bought in Vienna in 1739 and possibly sent by Cortés to Charles I in 1519; the Madrid Codex may also have been sent by Cortés; the Paris Codex turned up in a basket of old papers in a chimney corner of the Bibliothèque Nationale (1859); others went to Vienna, Rome (Borgia) and Florence. The one Maya book found on the land, the Grolier, surfaced from a cave in the 1970s. Pattern: what wasn't burned was shipped to European capitals and Rome, the same places that later wrote "world mythology." This supports the lens's mechanism: the books were in their hands

TEST (Rule 14, both sides)compare the earliest physically dated copies of each Old World legend (Gilgamesh tablets, Assurbanipal's library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek papyri; dated by radiocarbon and excavation context) with when the land's books reached Europe (1519 onward). An Old World copy securely dated before 1519 tells against "copied from the burned books" for that legend; a legend first written down in Europe after 1519 supports it. The friar-written cases (Babel at Cholula, the white god, Guadalupe; P815) already show copying in the other direction, onto the land's stories. Open, needs deep research legend by legend.