The Popol Vuh says twin boys found their dead father's ballgame gear hidden in the roof, and it led them to the lords of the underworld who had killed him

The Popol Vuh is the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya. Allen Christenson dates it to 1554 to 1558. The original is lost; the text survives in a copy made by the Dominican Francisco Ximénez in Chichicastenango in the early 1700s. In the myth, the brothers One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu are summoned to the underworld, Xibalba, and killed. One Hunahpu's elder sons, One Batz and One Chouen, stay home with their grandmother. The twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, born later to One Hunahpu, are treated by their half-brothers as servants: "In their hearts, we are looked upon as slaves." The twins send the half-brothers up a tree that grows until they cannot climb down, and they become spider monkeys. A rat then tells the twins what their grandmother hid: "It is what belonged to your fathers ... They left behind their gaming things hanging above the house." She had not shown them, "for it was because of them that your fathers died." The twins take the gear, the lords summon them, and they defeat Xibalba. They try to restore their father, but he can say only the first names, and they leave him honoured at the ballcourt: "Your name shall not be forgotten." The Ximénez manuscript is in the Newberry Library, Chicago, as Ayer MS 1515.