I am forever intrigued by… how little we “moderns” actually know — especially when compared to those who’ve predeceased us by thousands of years, half a continent away.

The classical Mayans, it turns out (long prior to the arrival of Cortez) were tracking at least four planets’ movements in the night skies very closely — and had organized that sideral motion into what amounted to a 45 year “long count” calendar. It was deadly accurate — and unknown anywhere on the planet to that point.

The Mayans’ multi-ton, colossal circular stone tablet could accurately predict where in the night sky one might find Mars, or Jupiter or Venus… even hundreds of years ahead into the future — or backward, thousands of years in the past. They had worked out the 45 year repeating pattern, and committed it to a gorgeously-ornate color-coded stone… to survive into eternity — for us.

By that point in human history (300 to 600 AD), no European could have offered even a guess at where to find Jupiter in the sky — even 20 years out. Almost no one in Europe even knew it was… “out there”. That should be humbling: it has taken us well into the 21^st Century to decipher what the Mayans were trying to teach us heathens:

…The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span. That’s a much broader view of the tricky calendar than anyone previously tried to take.

In a study published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, two Tulane University scholars highlighted how researchers never could quite explain the 819-day count calendar until they broadened their view.

“Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of visible planets,” the study authors write. “By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar….”

I certainly wish we could learn the names of those excellent Mayan astronomers — now likely forever lost — over thousands of years via the shifting sands of time itself. And while it is nice that the Tulane scholars “figured it back out” — that is simply standing on the shoulders of these… Mayan giants of calculus / mathematics, right?

We really ought to get over… ourselves — our supposedly vast “secret knowledge” hardly eclipses the ancients, even now. Smile.

नमस्ते