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11 - The Mayan Calendars

from I - Arithmetical Calendars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2018

Edward M. Reingold
Affiliation:
Illinois Institute of Technology
Nachum Dershowitz
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Summary

The invention of the Central American calendar in the Seventh century before Christ may be described with all propriety as one of the outstanding intellectual achievements in the history of man. This calendar solved with conspicuous success the great problem of measuring and defining time which confronts all civilized nations. Moreover it required the elaboration of one of the four or five original systems of writing the parts of speech in graphic symbols, and it conjoined with this supplementary invention of hieroglyphs the earliest discovery of the device of figures with place values in the notation of numbers. This time machine of ancient America was distinctly a scientific construction, the product of critical scrutiny of various natural phenomena by a master mind among the Mayas. It permitted a school of astronomer-priests to keep accurate records of celestial occurrences over a range of many centuries, with the ultimate reduction of the accumulated data through logical inferences to patterns of truth.

Herbert J. Spinden: The Reduction of Mayan Dates (1924)

The Mayans, developers of an ancient Amerindian civilization in Central America, employed three separate, overlapping, calendrical systems called by scholars the long count, the haab, and the tzolkin. Their civilization reached its zenith during the period 250-900 c.e., and theMayans survive to this day in Guatemala and in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Belize; some groups have preserved parts of the calendar systems. What is known today has been recovered through astroarcheological and epigraphic research (see, for example, [10]). There is general agreement on the Mayan calendrical rules and the correspondence between the three Mayan calendars; however, the exact correspondence between the Mayan calendars and Western calendars is still a matter of some slight dispute (see [1]). Correspondences are proposed by date equivalences in Spanish sources and by interpreting Mayan recordings of astronomical phenomena, such as new moons. Here we give the details for the most popular (and nearly universally accepted) correspondence, the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation [20]. Another correlation was used by Spinden [17], [18], [19]. A superb discussion of Mayan mathematics, astronomy, and calendrical matters was given by Lounsbury [9] (see also [8]).

Type
Chapter
Information
Calendrical Calculations
The Ultimate Edition
, pp. 169 - 184
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

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[20] J. E. S., Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, 3rd edn., University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1971.Google Scholar

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