explanations in French that the Abbé included to aid the readers who were not versed in the Spanish language to understand the text better.
Bound in the same volume with the Arte de las tres lenguas is a Confesionario and a Catecismo de Indios, also in the three languages, works of short length; and finally, in a volume consisting of 112 pages, written in two parallel columns with remarkable neatness and care, is the copy of the Manuscript of Chichicastenango written by Ximénez following the original text, accompanied by his first translation of it into Spanish. This valuable document has the following title: Empiezan las historias del origen de los Indios de esta provincia de Guatemala, traduzido de la lengua quiché en la castellana para más comodidad de los Ministros del Sto. Evangelio, por el R. P. F. Franzisco Ximénez, Cura doctrinero por el Real Patronato del Pueblo de Sto. Thomas Chuilá. In the opinion of Brasseur de Bourbourg, this manuscript may be considered the original of the Popol Vuh.
This, in effect, is the only old copy, known to have survived, of the Quiché manuscript composed by an unknown author about the middle of the sixteenth century. This translation is the first one which Ximénez made, and it was also the first one to be published, when it was printed in Vienna, in 1857, under the auspices of the imperial Academy of Sciences.
This document is followed by the Escolios a las Historias de el Origen de los Indios, escoliadas por el R. P. F. Franzisco, Ximénez, Cura Doctrinero por el Real Patronato del Pueblo de Sto. Thomás Chichicastenango, del Sagrado Orden de Predicadores, etc. These scholia consist only of a foreword and a chapter, and it seems that the author did not write more in this place. The material which they contain was used, in part, in the first book of his Historia de la Provincia, where the author continues his commentaries and writes in detail of the origin of the Quiché kingdom and the customs and ancient beliefs of its inhabitants.
The Historia by Father Ximénez consisted of three volumes which were jealously guarded in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Guatemala, and which for more than one hundred years remained unknown. The anonymous author of the Isagoge Histórica, written in the eighteenth century, mentions Ximénez as the discoverer and translator of the Manuscript of Chichicastenango, but the Isagoge itself was not published until 1892. The original manuscript of the Historia of Ximénez, which was lost for many years, still is preserved, although incomplete, in Guatemala. The first volume appeared in the library of Don José Cecilio del Valle, one of the fathers of the independence of Central America, and this first volume is today in the possession of his descendants in Guatemala City. This volume, as has been said, contains the first two books of the Chronicle of Ximénez and begins with the revised translation of the Historias del origen de los Indios. The third volume, containing Books VI and VII of the Historia, is preserved at the Government Archives of Guatemala.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Don Ramón de Ordóñez y Aguiar, canon of Chiapas, and author of the Historia de la Creación del Cielo y de la Tierra, which remained unpublished until 1907, was living in Guatemala. In the foreword to this work, Ordóñez y Aguiar says that he had found a valuable book written by Father Francisco Ximénez, who, as a result of his teachings, had discovered it among the Indians of the Quiché nation, and translated it literally, including its contents "in the first of the four volumes which, under the title of Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala he composed and in manuscript form are preserved in the library of his convent of Preaching Fathers of this capital." The text of the quotations from Ordóñez y Aguiar and the pages from which he says he has taken some sections which he included in his work show, however, that he did not consult the original of the Historia, but the copy which was kept in the Convent of Santo Domingo until 1830, when it was placed in the library of the University of Guatemala.
In his Historia de la Creación, Ordóñez y Aguiar reproduced the second version of the Historias del Quiché, taking it, as he himself says, from the first volume of the Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala. This transcription is sometimes literal, sometimes hardly more than an extract, and sometimes it seems to have been noticeably corrected
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