The Ancient Maya Used The Dresden Codex to Predict Solar Eclipses with Impressive Accuracy
Today, astronomers are able to predict a solar eclipse to the minute using sophisticated computer programming that combines Newton’s laws of motion with the positions and velocities of the Earth and Moon, as well as data on their orbits and inclination. Ancient Mayan guardians used paintings drawn in ink, engraved on the bark of fig trees.
In an article published in Scientific advancesresearchers explain how the Mayans were able to track solar eclipses with such impressive precision, revealing evidence of the evolution of lunar theory as early as 350 CE.
Ancient Maya and advanced systems
Indigenous civilizations living in Mexico and Guatemala had two calendars: a civil calendar of 365 days and a shorter “divinatory” calendar of only 260 days.
The latter were called upon by specialists (called “day guards”) to determine the fate of individuals based on their date of birth. This divinatory calendar was associated with the different phases of the moon around 500 BCE.
The ancient Mayans may have had large libraries and an advanced writing system, but very few of them remain today. Indeed, only four texts have survived, the oldest (and best preserved) being the Dresden Codex, which dates from around 1200 CE.
The Dresden Codex is an astronomical document about 3.5 meters (about 11 feet) long and accordion-folded, according to the Library of Congress. Among the ritual and divinatory calendars is a chart that can be used to predict the next solar eclipse.
While historians have previously suggested that predicting eclipses was its purpose, researchers writing in Science Advances say it was originally designed to be a general lunar calendar chart.
Learn more: Everything you need to know about lunar eclipses
Track the phases of the Moon
The team arrived at this conclusion using mathematics and a historical database of solar eclipses, finding that the total number of days included in the table (11,960) corresponds more easily to the 260-day calendar than to the eclipse cycles that would have been visible to the Mayan people between 350 and 1150 CE.
Essentially, the number of days (11,960) is divided by 260: 11,960 ÷ 260 = 46
The authors of the article also note the number of lunar months in the table (405) and compare it to the number of nodal passages, which play an important role in determining when an eclipse will occur. The average length of 405 lunar months is 0.11259 days less than 11,960.
On the other hand, 69 nodal passages are, on average, spaced 1.67486 days apart, a figure almost 15 times higher. This led researchers to conclude that the chart was more likely designed to track the phases of the moon than to predict upcoming solar eclipses.
A series of overlapping paintings
The other big question is how exactly the Mayans were able to maintain such a level of accuracy when it came to making predictions. According to the new document, this was achieved by adopting a system of overlapping tables.
Instead of starting a new eclipse table after an old table ends (as previously thought), daykeepers often reset the eclipse table to one of the previous two points of the previous table. This tended to be 358 lunations (or months) or 223 lunations. According to the researchers’ calculations, four “resets” at 385 months occurred for every one at 223 months.
“Restarting an eclipse table at these intervals and ratios would have allowed guardians to reliably reset the table for a few millennia,” the researchers add.
The researchers believe that after about three 405-month cycles, the Daykeepers could have observed a “fairly uniform pattern” that would allow them to create “a general framework by 453 CE.” Thus, they conclude, “it is therefore plausible that eclipse tables similar to those in the Dresden Codex could have existed around 550 CE.”
Learn more: Where is Tulum and why was it so important to the ancient Mayans?
Article Sources
Our Discovermagazine.com editors use peer-reviewed research and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review the articles for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. See the sources used below for this article:
