from the Introduction to Popol Vuh - Professor Dennis Tedlock

The roots of Mayan civilization may lie in the prior civilization of the Olmecs, which was flowering on the Gulf coastal plain of Veracruz and Tabasco by about 1200 B.C. A more immediate antecedent is the Izapan culture, which ran along the western and southern edges of the Mayan world and reached inside that world at the highland site of Kaminaljuyu, on the west side of what is now Guatemala City. …This emergence took place during the period they call the Early Classic (AD 300-600), and it was centred in the lowland rain forest that separates the mountain pine forest of Chiapas and Guatemala from the low and thorny scrub forest of northern Yucatan. Swamps were drained and trees were cleared to make way for intensive cultivation.
Hieroglyphic texts in great quantity were sculpted in stone and stucco, painted on pottery and plaster, and inked on long strips of paper that were folded like screens to make books.
During the Early Classic period lords from Teotihuacan, the great city of the central Mexican highlands, took control of Kaminaljuyu and established political and trade relationships with such lowland Mayan cities as Tikal.
The Late Classic period (AD. 600-900) opened with the collapse of Teotihuacan and its outpost at Kaminaljuyu, and it saw the establishment of a Mayan presence at Xochicalco and Cacaxtla in central Mexico. In the lowland rain forest, such Mayan cities as Palenque, Tikal, and Caracol rose to their greatest glory, and Chichen ltza was founded in the north. The southernmost city was Copan, located in the foothills of the highlands rather than in the rain forest. Its rise to prominence coincided with the decline of Kaminaljuyu, and it has recently been revealed that its rulers claimed descent from the royal line of Teotihuacan.
As the Late Classic period drew to a close, the Mayan communities that had carved out a place for themselves in the rain forest, along with Copan, were caught in a deepening vortex of overpopulation, environmental degradation, malnutrition, and warfare. At the same time, they were being bypassed by a developing sea-trade network that reached all the way around Yucatan from Tabasco to Honduras. By AD. 900, the political and economic strength of the larger city-states had broken under the strain. From that time until the European invasion, the remaining inhabitants of the rain forest lived in smaller towns along the shores of lakes, rivers, and estuaries. The greater part of the Maya population was now divided between two areas that had been on the periphery during Classic times, one in northern Yucatan and the other in the southern highlands.
The Late Postclassic (from AD. 1200 to the European invasion) saw the rise of the kingdom of Mayapan in the north and that of Quiche in the south, both of them tribute-collecting conquest states that followed Chichen ltza in giving mythic prominence to a divine king named Plumed Serpent. At the core of each of these states was an alliance of noble lineages that was largely Mayan but included Mexicans whose native language was Nahua. The heads of these lineages, whatever their places of origin, resided in the capital, surrounded by fortifications.
Carved inscriptions were no longer a major feature of Mayan monuments and buildings during the Postclassic period, but writing and painting flourished on plastered walls and the pages of books. This is especially evident for sites located on or near the east coast of Yucatan, from the island of Cozumel and the mainland sites of Coba, Tancah, and Tulum in the north down to Santa Rita Corozal in Belize. The illustrations in three of the surviving Mayan books, the ones now known as the Madrid, Paris, and Dresden codices, have strong ties in both style and content to the wall art of this region.

Cortes and his men saw many books when they landed on Cozumel, and there is good evidence that the loot they took away with them included the Dresden Codex. The writing in Post-classic books, as compared with Classic writing, shows an increased reliance on phonetic signs, including the use of distinctly Mayan signs to spell out words borrowed from Nahua.

Popol Vuh – translated by Dennis Tedlock
Black Butterfly and Tepepul, in the ninth generation, Eight Cord, with Quicab, in the tenth generation of lords.  Seven Thought and Cauatepech next, eleventh in the sequence of lords.  Three Deer and Nine Dog, in the twelfth generation of lords. And they were ruling when Tonatiuh [Cortes] arrived. They were tortured by the Castilian people.
Black Butterfly and Tepepul were tributary to the Castilian people. They had already been begotten as the thirteenth generation of lords. Don Juan de Rojas and Don Juan Cortes, in the fourteenth generation of lords. They are the sons of Black Butterfly and Tepepul.

from the Introduction to Popol Vuh - Professor Dennis Tedlock

The Spanish invasion of the Mayan world began during the sixteenth century, and so did a long history of Mayan resistance that continues right down to the broadcast news of our own day. Backed by means of persuasion that included gunpowder, instruments of torture, and the threat of eternal damnation, the invaders established a monopoly on virtually all major forms of visible public expression, whether in drama, architecture, sculpture, painting, or writing. In the highlands, when they realized that textile designs carried complex messages, they even attempted to ban the wearing of Mayan styles of clothing. Hundreds of hieroglyphic books were burned by missionaries, but they were still in use as late as the end of the seventeenth century in Yucatan and the beginning of the eighteenth in highland Guatemala. Only four books are known to have survived to the present day, including the three that found their way to Madrid, Paris, and Dresden long ago. A fourth was recovered in 1966 from looters who had found it in a dry cave in Chiapas.
But the survival of ancient Mayan literature was not dependent on the survival of its outward forms. Just as Mayan peoples learned to use the symbolism of Christian saints as masks for ancient gods, so they learned to use the Roman alphabet as a mask for ancient texts. There was no little justice in the fact that it was the missionaries themselves, the burners of the ancient books, who first introduced Mayans to alphabetic writing.
What they wanted their pupils to write was translations of Christian prayers, sermons, and catechisms into Mayan languages, but very little time passed before some Mayans found political and religious applications for alphabetic writing that suited their own purposes. These independent writers have left a literary legacy that is both more extensive than the surviving hieroglyphic corpus and more open to understanding.
Their most notable works, created as alphabetic substitutes for hieroglyphic books, are the Chilam Balam or "Jaguar Translator" books of Yucatan and the Popol Vuh of Guatemala.