Mystery of the Mayan calendar may have been deciphered – 04/24/2023 – Science

US researchers believe they have found an explanation for one of the cycles of the system developed in the pre-Columbian era that has intrigued researchers for decades. Possible answer involves mathematics and astronomy.

The Mayan calendar is a complex system formed by calendars of various cycles of different lengths, developed centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Of the calendars that comprise it, the 819-day calendar is the one that most intrigues contemporary anthropologists.

This cycle is known simply as the 819 day count. The problem is that, until now, researchers haven’t been able to connect those 819 days to anything.

Anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker of Tulane University in New Orleans, USA, believe they have finally cracked the code.

All they had to do was broaden the scope of their research, studying how the calendar worked over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and relating that to the time it takes for a celestial object to return to approximately the same time. point, known as the synodic period.

While previous research has attempted to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, “By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819 days, a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all visible planets correspond to positional points on the 819-day calendar. days”, Linden and Bricker point out in an article published last week in the scientific journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

A mysterious and intriguing cycle

It’s a calendar based on glyphs (symbolic designs usually engraved in relief) that repeat four times, with each block of 819 days corresponding to one of four colors and, scientists initially thought, to a cardinal point. Red had been associated with the east; the white, to the north; the black, to the west; and yellow, to the south. It wasn’t until the 1980s that researchers realized that this assumption was incorrect.

Instead, white and yellow were associated with the zenith and nadir respectively, an interpretation befitting astronomy. The Sun rises in the east, travels across the sky to its highest point (zenith), sets in the west, then passes through its lowest point on the celestial sphere (nadir) and then rises again in the east.

There were other clues that suggested that the 819-day count was associated with the synodic periods of visible planets in the Solar System. The Mayans had extremely accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

How do synodic periods work in the 819 day cycle?

Now scientists at Tulane University have finally found a pattern. Mercury is easy: it has a synodic period of 117 days, which fits into 819 days exactly seven times. But where do the rest of the planets fit in?

Each of the visible planets has a synodic period with a certain number of multiples that exactly coincides with a number of cycles of 819 days. The synodic period of Venus is 585, and a ratio is reached after five multiples of 819 and seven multiples of 585 (5 × 819 = 4095 days = 7 × 585).

Mars, on the other hand, has a synodic period of 780 days, which, if multiplied by 21, exactly coincides with 20 counts of 819 days (20 x 819 = 16,380 = 21 x 780).

Jupiter’s synodic period of 399 days fits exactly 39 times in 19 cycles (19 x 819 = 15,561 = 39 x 399); and Saturn’s synodic period of 378 days fits 13 times into 6 cycles (6 x 819 = 4,914 = 13 x 378).

Link with another calendar

And there’s even a compelling link to the 260-day Mayan calendar known as the Tzolk’in or Mayan Sacred Cycle. Twenty periods of 819 days add up to a total of 16,380 days. If we multiply the Tzolk’in by 63, we get 16,380 days. And 16,380 is the smallest multiple that 260 and 819 have in common. Therefore, both come together perfectly in the count of 20 cycles of 819 days established by Linden and Bricker.

“Rather than limiting their focus to a single planet, the Mayan astronomers, who created the 819-day count, envisioned it as a broader calendar system that could be used for predictions of all synodic periods of planets visible and with points coincidence with their cycles in Tzolk’in,” the scientists observe.