The cycle that appeared in Mayan calendars has been largely a mystery since their rediscovery and decipherment began in the 1940s.
It covers a period of 819 days and the cycle is simply stated as the number of 819 days. The problem is that the researchers were unable to compare the 819 days to anything.
But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker of Tulane University now think they have finally cracked the code. All they had to do was expand their thinking, study how the calendar works over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and correlate it with the time it takes for a celestial body to return to approximately the same point in the sky – the so-called synodic period.
“While previous research aimed to show planetary conjunctions over 819 days, the four-segment direction color scheme is too short to match well with the combined periods of the visible planets,” they wrote in their paper. Calendar to 20 Period 819 days, a pattern appears in which the synodic periods of all visible planets are proportional to the parking points in the larger calendar of 819 days.
The Mayan calendar is actually a complex, smaller calendar system that was developed centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Among compound calendars, the listing of 819 days is the most confusing for contemporary anthropologists. It’s a glyph-based calendar that repeats four times, with each block of 819 days corresponding to one of the four colors that scientists first thought were cardinal directions. Red was associated with the east, white with the north, black with the west, and yellow with the south. It wasn’t until the 1980s that researchers realized that this assumption was wrong.
Instead, white and yellow were associated with culmination and nadir, respectively, an interpretation that fits with astronomy as the sun rises in the east, moves across the sky to its highest point (culmination), moves in the west, and then passes through perihelion. . reappear in the east.
There was other evidence indicating that the 819-day count was related to the combined periods of the visible planets in the solar system. The Maya had very accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The difficulty, however, is to try to figure out how these synodic periods work in the context of the 819-day count. It has a synodic period of 117 days, which is proportional to 819 days exactly seven times. But where do the rest of the planets fit in?
It turns out that each of the visible planets has a synodic period exactly corresponding to the number of cycles of 819 days. The total period of Venus is 585 days; This corresponds exactly to the 7 numbers of 819 days. The synodic period of Mars is 780 days; This is exactly 20 numbers of 819 days. Jupiter and Saturn are also not excluded. Jupiter’s synodic period of 399 days corresponds exactly to 39 times in 19 numbers; Saturn’s synodic period of 378 days is ideal for 6 times.
Whenever historians are asked to interpret important measurements of ancient origins, they run the risk of reading too deeply and misunderstanding the meanings.
The Mayan calendar is far from a simple system based on the basics of astronomy. And we should not be surprised at all that the scale of the Maya universe covers such a large space and time.
The study was published in Ancient Mesoamerica.
Source: Science Alert
