Of the constituent calendars, the number of 819 days is the most perplexing to modern anthropologists
The cycle presented in the Mayan calendars has been quite a mystery since it was rediscovered and deciphered in the 1940s. Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is simply called the 819-day count.
The problem is that the researchers couldn’t compare those 819 days to anything. But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker of Tulane University now think they’ve finally cracked the code. All they had to do was stretch their thinking, studying how the calendar works over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and relate it to the time it takes for a celestial object to appear to return to roughly the same point in the sky—the which is called the synodic period.
“Although previous research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part color scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of the visible planets,” they write in their paper.
By increasing the length of the calendar to 20 periods of 819 days, a pattern appears in which the synodic periods of all visible planets are proportional to the station points in the larger 819-day calendar. The Mayan calendar is actually a complicated system made up of smaller calendars, developed several centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Of the constituent calendars, the number of 819 days is the most perplexing to modern anthropologists. It’s a glyph-based calendar that repeats four times, with each block of 819 days corresponding to one of four colors and, scientists initially thought, a cardinal direction. Red was associated with the east, white with the north, black with the west, and yellow with the south. Only in the 1980s did researchers realize that this assumption was incorrect, reports Science alert. Instead, white and yellow were associated with the zenith and nadir, respectively—an interpretation that fits with astronomy, as the Sun rises in the east, travels across the sky to its highest point, sets in the west, and then travels through its lowest level to set again. rises in the east.
There were other clues suggesting that the number of 819 days is related to the synodic periods of the visible planets in the solar system. The Maya had extremely accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. However, the difficulty was in trying to understand how these synodic periods functioned in the context of the 819 day count. Mercury is easy, it has a synodic period of 117 days, which fits exactly seven times into 819 days. But where did the other planets fit in?
It turns out that each of the visible planets has a synodic period that exactly corresponds to the number of cycles of 819 days. Venus’s synodic period is 585 days, which neatly coincides with the seven-numbered cycle of 819 days. Mars has a synodic period of 780 days, which is exactly 20 counts of 819 days.
Jupiter and Saturn were not left out either. Jupiter’s synodic period of 399 days fits exactly 39 times in 19 points, and Saturn’s synodic period of 378 days fits perfectly in six calculations.
And there is even a compelling connection to the 260-day calendar known as the Tzolkin. Twenty periods of 819 days total 16,380 days. If you multiply the Tzolkin 63 times, you get 16,380 days. In fact, 16,380 is the smallest multiple that 260 and 819 have in common. So the two tie in nicely with the 20 cycles of 819 days set out by Linden and Bricker.
“The expansion of the standard cycle of four times 819 days to 20 periods of 819 days indeed provides a larger calendar system with proportions at its stations for the synodic periods of all the visible planets. Most importantly this larger calendar system of 20 periods of 819 days provides a mechanism for re-establishing the number days and the day names of Tzolkin each time a cycle of 20 819-day periods begins,” the researchers write, adding that rather than limiting their focus to any one planet, the Mayan astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used to predict all the synodic periods of the visible planet, as well as points of proportion to their cycles in the colkin and calendar circle.
Any time historians are asked to interpret significant measurements of ancient origin, they run the risk of reading too deeply and misattributing values. This is not to say that Linden and Bricker’s proposal is numerology dressed up as academia, although it is important to let the science do its job and watch out for criticism and rebuttals. However, the Mayan calendar is far from a simple system based on basic astronomy.
(Politics)