The Popol Vuh is the fullest surviving account of creation from anywhere in the Maya world, and it is K'iche'. It was set down in the K'iche' language using Latin letters in the middle of the sixteenth century, copied at the beginning of the eighteenth by the Dominican Francisco Ximenez at Chichicastenango, and survives only in his manuscript, now held at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Its narrative runs in two movements. The gods make the world and attempt humanity more than once, from mud and then from wood, and both failures are described as failures of speech and memory, because the made beings cannot name their makers. Between the attempts stands the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are summoned to Xibalba, the underworld, are tested in its houses of cold, of knives and of bats, and defeat its lords by allowing themselves to be killed and then returning. Maize is what humanity is finally made from, which places the staple crop and the substance of the human body in one category.
The last section is genealogy and history, tracing the K'iche' lineages and their rule in the highlands. Dennis Tedlock's translation works from that structure and from his own study with contemporary K'iche' daykeepers, arguing that the text is not a dead document but a book read alongside a calendar still being counted.