Here is my theory.
In 1519, when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors arrived in the heart of Mesoamerica, they encountered more than gold and empire. Deep within the temples and codices of the Maya and the ruins of ancient trade cities, they found startling clues: symbols, cosmology, architectural alignments, and myths that mirrored what European scholars vaguely knew of ancient Egypt. These weren't coincidences. They were evidence—evidence of a long-lost transoceanic connection between two of the world’s greatest ancient civilizations.
Such a discovery would have shaken the foundations of European thought. The Church, still reeling from the Reformation, upheld a worldview in which Europe was the center of knowledge and divine destiny. A documented link between the “pagan” Maya and the ancient Egyptians—whose civilization was already entangled with early Christian, Islamic, and classical thought—would have undermined not only biblical chronology but also European supremacy.
Complicating matters further, Egypt had just been conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1517, bringing it under Muslim rule. For Christian Spain, locked in centuries of war with Islamic powers across North Africa and the Mediterranean, any hint that Mesoamerica had ties to Muslim-occupied lands was politically and religiously intolerable.
The theory follows that the conquistadors, possibly under direct instruction or through Church influence, made the decision to erase this link. Codices were burned. Artifacts were destroyed or sent to Europe under secrecy. Stone inscriptions and glyphs with potential Old World ties were chiseled away. What remained was a narrative of savagery and superstition—justification for conquest and conversion.
This destruction, cloaked as religious purification and colonial necessity, served a deeper strategic purpose: to sever any visible ties between the ancient world of Africa and the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, thereby ensuring the West could rewrite the narrative of civilization, discovery, and dominion.