Mayan Astronomy
The Maya were quite accomplished astronomers. Their primary interest,
in contrast to "western" astronomers, were Zenial Passages when the Sun
crossed over the Maya latitudes. On an annual basis the sun travels to
its summer solstice point, or the latitude of 23-1/3 degrees north.
Most of the Maya cities were located south of this latitude, meaning
that they could observe the sun directly overhead during the time that
the sun was passing over their latitude. This happened twice a year, evenly
spaced around the day of solstice.
The Maya could easily determine these dates, because at local noon,
they cast no shadow. Zenial passage observations are possible only in the
Tropics and were quite unknown to the Spanish conquistadors who descended
upon the Yucatan peninsula in the 16th century. The Maya had a god to represented
this position of the Sun called the Diving God.
The Maya believed the Earth was flat with four corners. Each corner
represented a cardinal direction. Each direction had a color: east-red;
north-white; west-black; south-yellow. Green was the center.
At each corner, there was a jaguar of a different color that supported
the sky. The jaguars were called bacabs.
Mayans believed the universe was divided into thirteen layers, each
with its own god.
The Milky Way
The Milky Way itself was much venerated by the Maya. They called it
the World Tree, which was represented by a tall and majestic flowering
tree, the Ceiba. The Milky Way was also called the Wakah Chan. Wak means
"Six" or "Erect". Chan or K'an means "Four", "Serpent" or "Sky". The World
Tree was erect when Sagittarius was well over the horizon. At this time
the Milky Way rose up from the horizon and climbed overhead into the North.
The star clouds that form the Milky Way were seen as the tree of life where
all life came from.
Near Sagittarius, the center of our galaxy, where the World Tree meets
the Ecliptic was given special attention by the Maya. A major element of
the World Tree include the Kawak Monster, a giant head with a kin in its
forehead.
This monster was also a mountain or witz monster. A sacrificial bowl
on its head contains a flint blade representing sacrifice, and the Kimi
glyph that represents death. The Ecliptic is sometimes represented as a
bar crossing the major axis of the world tree, making a form that is similar
to the Christian Cross. On top of the World Tree we find a bird that has
been called, the Principal Bird deity, or Itzam Ye. There is also evidence
that shows the Sun on the World Tree as it appeared to the Maya at Winter
Solstice.
During the months of winter, when the so-called "Winter" Milky Way dominates
the sky, it was called the "White Boned Serpent." This part of the Milky
Way passed overhead at night during the dry season. It is not brilliant
like the star clouds that dominate the sky North of the equator during
the months of Summer, but observers at dark locations will easily see the
glow. Here the Ecliptic crosses the Milky Way again, near the constellation
of Gemini which was the approximate location of the Sun during Summer Solstice.
It is possible that the jaws of the White-Boned Serpent were represented
by the Kawak monster head.
The Maya portrayed the Ecliptic in their artwork as a Double-Headed
Serpent. The ecliptic is the path of the sun in the sky which is marked
by the constellations of fixed stars. Here the moon and the planets can
be found because they are bound, like the Earth, to the sun.
The constellations on the ecliptic are also called the zodiac. We don't
know exactly how fixed constellations on the ecliptic were seen by the
Maya, but we have some idea of the order in some parts of the sky. We know
there is a scorpion, which we equate with our own constellation of Scorpius.
It has also been found that Gemini appeared to the Maya as a pig or
peccary, (a nocturnal animal in the pig family.) Some other constellations
on the ecliptic are identified as a jaguar, at least one serpent, a bat,
a turtle, shark, or a sea monster.
The Pleiades were seen as the tail of the rattlesnake and is called,
"Tz'ab."
Approximately one millennium before Archbishop Usher of Armagh concluded
that creation occurred at 4004 B.C., the Mayans had calculated the cosmos
was 90 million years old.
Like other pre-Columbian civilizations, the Maya had a profound knowledge
of the sky. Their priests recorded astronomical observations and passed
them down from generation to generation.
The result was an extremely accurate calendar that predicted the coming
of eclipses and the revolutions of Venus to an error of one day in 6,000
years.
Only a handful of the parchments that chronicle this knowledge survived
the zealous bonfires of the missionaries; those that did are now called
codices. In one, for example, Venus is represented as a figure with two
masks, symbolizing its appearance in the early morning and evening.
The calendar itself was divided into cycles 3 million years long, subdivided
into units of 20 years, 400, 8,000 and 158,000 years. There were also subunits
for marking the death and rebirth of the sun and fire. Rituals punctuated
the cycles and acted like the needles of a clock, marking the passage of
time.
It is difficult to talk of Mayan astronomy itself because it was truly
part of a greater discipline: religion. The Mayan ball game is the perfect
embodiment of this fact. Transmitted from previous local civilizations
as far back as 3,000 B.C., it consisted in using hips, legs and the head
to get a ball across a line or through a hoop.
Different symbols are brought together in the ball game. Archaeologists
think the ball symbolized the sun and the game re-enacted its apparent
orbit around the Earth. The sun was worshipped as a god and by playing
the game, one became somewhat akin to the Sun-God. But the game might also
have signaled a changing season, so that it served a purpose as well. Since
agrarian societies require a timekeeper to regulate agricultural tasks,
these rituals were vital to the Mayan society's survival.
Pre-Columbian ball courts and other buildings functioned both as religious
temples and observatories. The architecture was used to define orientations
and mark the passage of time. When Orion appeared through a designated
hole or the sun shone directly on a specific spot, it meant spring was
near. The pyramid of El Taj’n in Mexico, for example, is made up of 365
niches, one for each day of the year.
Smaller calendars were sculpted into stone and gold. It is no wonder
then that artists were highly regarded and given special status in Mayan
society. Without artists there would be no calendars, no way to tell time,
bad crops and eventually famine. For the Maya, astronomy was enmeshed into
one thick fabric with art, agriculture and religion.
The Dresden Codex - the Book of Mayan Astronomy
The advanced Mayan culture developed thanks to a complex synthesis of
different culture streams arising from the home agricultural base, influenced
by cultural values coming from regions lying out of the territory of Mayan
settlement. Its forming falls to the so-called early phase of the initial
period placed between 1500 - 800 BC. It was spread step-by-step to the
regions of Guatemala, south-eastern Mexico, Belize, Salvador and north-western
Honduras. The construction of beautiful and splendid cathedral cities,
fine arts of sculpture and painting, use of their own hieroglyphic script,
success in astronomy, existence of the literature and the development of
handicraft and trade were the outer expression of this cultural-economic
rise.
The results of Mayan observations and calculations of astronomical phenomena
are concentrated in the Dresden Codex. It is a band of paper 3.5 meter
long set up into 39 sheets making up 78 pages 8.5 x 20.5 cm. The paper
was obtained from the bark of wild-growing species of fig tree. It is supposed
that it originates from Yucatan as a latter transcription of an elder original.
It contains calendrical data, written in the Mayan dating system, concerning
astronomical data and the sky mechanics, and tables of multiple integers
that are to be used for calculations of planetary movement ephemerids and
tropical years, next to the hieroglyphic texts and numerous depicturings
of the Mayan gods and ritual scenes.
The data contained in the Dresden Codex were studied by many researchers
who suspected they contain astronomical data. M.Meinshausen (1913), C.E.Guthe
(1921) and H.Spinden (1930) were the first who had been interested in the
eclipses tables. E.Foerstemann has drawn our attention to Venus visibility
ephemerides tables; he also issued the Dresden Codex with a commentary
in 1892. The analysis of these ephemerides has been made by J.E.Teeple
(1926). R.W.Wilson believed that some of the data could concern the observations
of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (1924). The above-mentioned researchers, and
lots of others, worked with the calculation coefficients of 584,283 or
584,285 days accordingly to Goodman-Martinez-Thompson when converting the
Mayan dates into the Christian dating system, or tried to calculate their
own coefficient. For this reason their conclusions were very diverse.
One of the most important problems during the studies of various Mayan
culture phenomena had been the problem of correlating the Mayan to our
Christian dating system. In present times we are used to correlate the
Mayan dates with the Christian ones using the Goodman-Mart’nez-Thompson
correlation. Accordingly to it, a stable coefficient of 584,283 or 584,285
days is added to the Mayan dates expressing the counts of days which have
passed from a particular day to the date of a certain event. The Mayan
date is converted into a Julian day number and the latter finally to the
corresponding day, month and year of the Julian calendar used in modern
astronomy.
Working with the Mayan data of the Dresden Codex we found that the Goodman-Mart’nez-Thompson
correlation is unusable, even for the dates evidently concerning certain
astronomical phenomena, such as the observations of Venus visibility, or
Sun and Moon eclipses. We have obtained a new coefficient of 622,261 days
for the conversion of the Mayan dates to our dating system by a complete
analysis of the mutual relations between the time intervals of all the
Mayan dates in the Dresden Codex and 400 inscriptions from the cathedral
cities. Using the so called Bšhm correlation coefficient we were successful
in proving that all data contained in the Dresden Codex are concerning
astronomical phenomena.
The Mayan astronomical observations were carried out by simple measuring
methods. It is therefore necessary to examine them statistically while
respecting unavoidable accuracy scatter. It applies first of all to the
sky phenomena calculated to the past and the future during several centuries
recorded in the Dresden Codex. The dated astronomical observations are
concerning following:
1.The observations of Venus visibility, when it had appeared for the
first time after its conjunction with the Sun as a morning star in the
sky shortly before the sunrise, or after its upper conjunction, when it
had appeared in the sky as an evening star shortly after the sunset.
2.The observations of Mercury visibility. Its trajectory creates an
eccentric ellipse. Thanks to this eccentricity the synodic circulations
of the planet lasts from 104 to 132 days. The average length of the synodic
circulation is 115.877484 days.
The considerable proximity of the planet to the Sun makes its glow suppressed
by dazzling sunshine.
For that reason, the Mayan astronomers could have observed it only when
the planet gets to the greatest angle distance during its circulation around
the Sun, so called elongation. It is the western elongation, when Mercury
rises over the horizon shortly before sunrise and the eastern elongation,
when it is briefly visible over the western horizon right after sunset.
The maximal angle distances are as a rule moving between 18 to 23 degrees.
The maximal elongation of 27 degrees and 49 minutes happens when this
elongation visible from the Earth runs during the epihelium, that means
the greatest distance between Mercury and the Sun (Mercury gets there once
for its sidereal circulation on its eccentric trajectory).
The sidereal circulation is the real time of circulation of any planet
around the Sun and it makes in this case 87.9693 days. During the perihelia
(minimal distance from the Sun) is the maximal angle distance visible from
the Earth 15 degrees and 55 minutes.
It seems as if the planet stood in one place for 4-12 days in the time
of maximal elongations.
Its angle distance from the Sun changes between 1-2 degrees. This insignificant
movement could not have been discovered by the Mayan observing methods.
For that reason their determination of Mercury elongations moves on
average inside the borders of that "mistake".
3.The solar eclipses and the fullmoons and newmoons.
4.The observation of the heliacal risings and settings of the planets.
The heliacal rise sets in after the planetsÕ conjunction with the
Sun, when they are visible in the morning sky before the sunrise. During
their heliacal setting the planets are visible in the evening sky after
sunset. In the period of conjunction the planets are invisible for a few
days. By observing the heliacal risings and settings dates we are able
to determine the length of the synodic circulations of the planets.
5.The observation of the planetary conjunctions (when two planets observable
from the Earth get in line and are nearly covering each other). The Dresden
Codex is mostly describing only close approaches of the planets because
some of the dates are calculated to the past and to the future.
6.The determination of equinoxes and solstices.
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