A HEAVENLY FIND: Faded bar-and-dot numerals on the wall of a structure in Guatemala, enhanced here by an overlaid illustration of the markings, were recently discovered by archaeologist William Saturno and his colleagues. The numbers relate to various astronomical phenomena, although their exact meaning is not yet known.
Image: Illustration by William Saturno and David Stuart © 2012 National Geographic
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An excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year—in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.)
Archaeologists stumbled onto the astronomical tables, inscribed on the walls of a small building, while excavating part of the Xultun ruins, a large, heavily looted archaeological site in northern Guatemala, near its borders with Mexico and Belize. William Saturno, an archaeologist at Boston University (B.U.), recalls that an undergraduate student noticed the remains of a mural on one of the walls, triggering an excavation of the room, which had been partly exposed by looters. On three of the walls the researchers found figural paintings, along with a series of glyphs and numerals.
The presence of lunar glyphs in one of the numerical tables raised the possibility that the table related to astronomy. After all, evidence from later centuries has proved that the Maya kept highly accurate records of astronomical phenomena. But the context of the numerals, many of which have deteriorated beyond recognition, was not immediately clear. "It took some decoding," Saturno says.
The numbers on the table, arranged in columns of three numerals each, looked like calendrical entries in well-studied Mayan manuscripts, written on bark paper, that survive from sometime around the 13th to 15th centuries. So the researchers took the numbers to be days tallied in units of the culture's Long Count calendar—the three numerals in each column representing multiples of a 360-day "tun," a 20-day "winal" and a one-day "k'in," respectively. The number column 13/5/4, then, would equal 4,784 days (13 x 360 + 5 x 20 + 4). The dates of the final two columns, which are the most legible, are separated by 178 days. The date in the third-to-last column, which is mostly legible, looks to be separated from that in the penultimate column by 177, 178 or 179 days, pointing to a common pattern.
The Maya clustered lunar months into sixes, making lunar "semesters" lasting 177 or 178 days. The variation accounts for the calendar's whole-number approximation of a messy decimal number, in much the same way that the modern calendar uses 366-day leap years to keep the months in sync with Earth's orbit around the sun. The researchers suggest that the Xultun table marks a series of lunar semesters over some 13 years. Saturno and his colleagues from B.U., the University of Texas at Austin and Colgate University report their findings in the May 11 issue of Science.
Another table contains four much larger numbers whose meaning is less clear. But all four numbers are divisible by 18,980, the number of days that makes up what is known as the Calendar Round, a combined cycle of the solar year and the Mayan ritual year. "It turns out these numbers are really important anniversaries," Saturno says. "They’re essentially numbers that represent multiples of Maya calendrical periods."
Intriguingly, the tables also hint at planetary motions. All four numbers are multiples of 780, the number of days it takes Mars to return to the same location in the sky, a tally known as the synodic period of Mars. The tallies are also closely related to the position of Venus: all four are whole- or half-number multiples of Venus’s synodic period. If the numbers indeed represent days, the largest entry in the table, 2,448,420, lies thousands of years in the future.
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18 Comments
Add CommentIt is amazing and I bet it talks about more than these geos can understand. They were a very complex society, and I wonder how they got that way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid anybody really thought that because an ancient calendar ended in 2012 that was going to be the end of humanity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJupiter cycle is really important, the relation with our moon needs to be investigated because they know something by practice or event that we have not pass yet and it was important for the maya culture, if we see the solar cycle of 11 or 12 years is very similar with Jupiter orbit, moon have incidence in biological and geophysical about earth. Its really amazing how a culture without technology like us make those discoveries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Messy decimal system."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI challenge this statement. Base ten math has flaws. It may be just as messy as the Mayans Base six math. After all, Symmetry has yet to be found.
You are challenging your own statement. The article referred to a messy decimal number, ie a number with which it is inconvenient or difficult to work. That is hardly the same as an attack on our counting system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApparently there are those who do. In this case however, I think the author is making a tongue in cheek reference rather than attempting to reassure the readership of SA.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow if the new information from Xutun can be matched up with the astronomy of the Popol Vuh, we should have an accurate account of the birth to the disintegration of a nova... How many years did it take before it exploded?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow if the new information from Xultun can be matched up with the astronomy of the Popol Vuh, we should have an accurate account of the birth to the disintegration of a nova... How many years did it take before it exploded?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am just so impressed by the work archaeologists do and the scientists who have decoded the writings/paintings that have been discovered to give us this information - this comes after YEARS of study and training and long, long days, hours, years of searching and researching. My hat is off to their brilliant minds and devotion to the art and science of discovery!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting that Mars and Venus feature so loudly in Aztec culture. Could it be that the whole point of astronomy was to keep a check on known planetary vandals? There is still plenty of evidence that these two planets have been misbehaving for thousands of years. Even if Velikovsky got the big heave-ho, he was right to point out the paranoid sky-watching many cultures engaged in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpace probes have shown catastrophic devastation on both planets. Mars bearing the biggest gashed gorge in the solar system and Venus still unbelievably hot, blistered and poisonous. Perhaps the ancients had a genuine fear of these rogue planets, watching for the slightest deviation from their paths. We don't understand, since life has been pretty stable for 1000 years. Astronomy has become a sedate pastime..unless the asteroids become a menace!
Venus and Mars figure so much in mythology because they are the two brightest things in the sky after the moon and the sun. Jupiter is also a biggy but at the end of the day Venus and Mars are the two that approach the Earth by almost 30,000,000 miles and because Venus is almost as big as our planet, cloud covered, very very bright and also because it is between the Earth and the Sun it acts weird! I can see how Venus held marvel to all civilizations. Mercury is neat because only rarely does it pop its head up high enough to even be counted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMars is predictable, does some funky spinning that drove astronomers a little crazy but was predictable to show up every year and some years brighter than others but at opposition always bright red.
If the Mayans had a telescope they would have really enjoyed Jupiter and Saturn because of the moons and the obvious ring around Saturn. Velikovsky was so off on his sense of timing and never took into consideration earthly events such as Thera being the cause of many of the biblical events and also the end of the Ice Age which I am sure caused havoc as Ice Dams gave way to water pressure as the ice melted.
I don't want to do the Carl Sagan on Velikovsky because he did manage to make some interesting predictions but his ideals that the events took place during historical times blows his theories out of the water. Kind of like when they found out the Shroud of Turin was on cloth that dates back to the 13th century. Just a little off the biblical dates required.
As always, I am amazed that we are so wrapped up in these issues/non=issues (really) and continue to ignore important science such as nanotubes, synthetic diamonds, graphene, carbon composites, cynobacteria and other real science that would free us from our hydrocarbon addiction. If you want to read some real science please refer to two highly under looked at articles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydrogen-production-comes-natu&posted=1
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=angela-belcher-building-t
But that will take some real thinking out of the box to understand.
Haven’t seen a picture of the tables which include 13.5.4 = 4.784 days yet, but about the the picture with the 4 big numbers, if they are dates…….
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1.195.740 days = 8.6.1.9.0 = 8 June 161 AD
341.640 = 2.7.9.0.0 = 28 December 2178 BC
2.448.420 = 1.4.0.1.3.0 = 27 February 3591 AD
1.765.140 = 12.5.3.3.0 = 26 May 1720 AD.
All dates have the Haab/Tzolkin notation 8 Cumku/4 Ahau and seem to be a ‘day of creation’ like 0.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count (11 August 3113 BC) which I assume is the base for these newfound numbers as it certainly is for the ‘fearsome’ 13.0.0.0.0 at the end of this year.
These numbers of days are all dividable by:
- 4 (representing the Four Winds in the Maya world)
- 9 (Lords Of The Night, a special calendar of 819 days = 9 x 91)
- 13 (the mysterious baktun number like the overall creation date from that stone in Coba and the ‘doomsday’ inscriptions of Tortuguero. It is also the number of days you will ‘lose’ in 52 years according to Maya philosophy. Or is it the symbolisation of the 13th zodiac? And off course what is mentioned in the article, moon cycle)
- 52 (ah that’s why 13)
- 18.980 (number of days of 1 ‘Aztec century’ of 52 years of 365 days. Besides that, add up 13 to 18.980 and you have almost 52 of solar years (365,25 days). Of course the Maya’s knew the solar year more exactly; 1.872.000 days = 13 baktuns are what our Gregorian calendar (including leap years) takes from 08-11-3113 BC to 12-21-2012 AD like it takes 2.448.420-341.640=2.106.780 days to fulfil the period mentioned above.
- 365 (this is what Maya’s named the Haab, a calendar with 18 month of 20 days and 5 unlucky days)
- 260 (number of day of the Tzolkin = 13 x 20 ).
- 780 (synodic period of Mars).
And if you take into consideration +/-1 day of correction which we also have found in the Dresden Codex, the numbers work pretty much with Venus (584) and even Mercury (117).
It is might be worth checking the dates with SkyMaps or anything like that.
There is probably a lot more behind the scenes…maybe sunspots too!
Game’s on, let’s do the math…..
I have many questions about this!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is amazing! As the mayan get the all information about the planets? Maybe, someone give this maps!
I know that this theme is taboo to the scientists in our planet.
But, if this informations are give by aliens! I am crazy?
This people haven t technology to fly in space!
After all this years we havent a dead certainty about the universe!
Who belive in this guesswork?
All I can say it that you all enjoy worrying more about end of days versus today that we will probably never fix the fixable and with our thumbs up some orifice succumb like lambs when the time comes, whether self imposed or just plain interplanetary luck.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know if this would help but HELLO!
My idea about selling "I Survived the End of the World" T-shirts doesn't look so good anymore.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI still believe there is a sucker born every minute. Sell the shirts. They will go over big at Tea Party meetings if Obama wins.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain and again, good science with real uses ignored. Don't believe me check out http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flexible-plastic-electronic-displays-co-exists-e-reader-market One comment so far, mine. Guys, stop worrying about Mayan Calendars, FTL, all the esoteric ain't gonna make your life better and pay attention to the science that can and should be getting our attention!
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