The Maya, very best regarded lately to the doomsday they in no way foretold, might have accurately predicted astronomical phenomena centuries in advance, scientists have uncovered.
A fresh guide, "Astronomy from the Maya Codices" (American Philosophical Society, 2011), which was awarded the Osterbrock Guide Prize for historical astronomy right here in the American Astronomical Society conference on Monday, facts a series of remarkable observations produced by pre-16th century Maya astronomers.
Anthropologist husband-wife crew Harvey and Victoria Bricker have devoted their lives to knowing the pre-Columbian Maya and the way they understood the entire world about them. The Brickers performed nearly all of their operate by translating complicated hieroglyphics to determine what Maya scribes felt was most significant to record on parchment.
By decoding early Mayan hieroglyphics from 4 distinctive codices housed in Madrid, Paris, Mexico and Dresden, the Brickers tracked how the evening sky would have looked towards the Mayans after they have been alive.
"We're coping with true information," Harvey Bricker stated. "They're not only squiggles."
The Brickers translated the dates cited during the Maya calendar to correspond with our calendar and after that applied modern-day information of planetary orbits and cycles to line up the Maya's information with ours. It had been remarkably correct.
The truth is, the Brickers located the astronomical calendar dated to your 11th or 12th century accurately predicted a solar eclipse to inside each day in 1991, centuries following the Maya civilization had ended. The 1991 eclipse occurred on July 11.The group also discovered the Maya had a fair variety of superstitions surrounding observable heavenly bodies from the evening sky. Around the friendly side, they'd the sun and also the moon ?a a god and goddess, respectively ?a whose cycles have been simple to map, predict and retain track of. While in the not-so-friendly camp have been Venus and Mars. The motions of people two planets ordinarily signaled doom and destruction according to their location within the sky, the Brickers uncovered.
The manuscripts warned that if Venus shines on small children, old women and men or healthier youthful guys at selected factors in its orbit, then harm would come to them.
Simply because the Maya desired to produce confident these possibly risky moments did not interfere using the lives of their individuals, Harvey Bricker stated, they kept incredibly thorough records of the place Venus and also other planets appeared while in the evening sky on particular days.
Mars ?a an animalistic god ?a signified gloomy days to come for everyone. "There was believed to get a romantic relationship, and never a delighted one particular, concerning phenomena linked with Mars and agriculture," Harvey Bricker mentioned.
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