Eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex were based on lunar tables and adjusted for slippage over time.
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Study: How the Maya created such accurate eclipse tables
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So they developed a method for ongoing precision rather than achieving a single, one-time feat of calculated accuracy.
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Their "scientists" / keepers of knowledge / Shaman / whatever probably had more knowledge of the solar system, sun, moon and the idea of what science is than every currently elected GOP official (federal and state) combined.
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I would love that publications like Are Technica not use these catch-all terms (scientists, researchers) to refer to specialized knowledge. Archeologist, mathematicians, anthropologists, etc.
One, it gives us perspective on their interests, two it separates the good grain from the chaff.
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A little annoying that they're mostly named after the European cities who stole them...
Thankfully it looks like the Grolier Codex was renamed to the Maya Codex of Mexico a few years back and was moved from the Grolier club in NY to the Mexico National Library in the 70s.
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One of many great tragedies of the European conquest was the loss of all the knowledge destroyed when Diego de Landa ordered the burning of dozens of Maya codices.
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Planet Earth about to be recycled. The only way to survive is to come with us.
[doesn't blink for 3 hours]
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To be clear, this was found in the Dresden Codex, not the Dresden Files, correct?
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Well, the Mayas were a few years off. It happens when you don't have ongoing adjustments over the past few centuries, I suppose. But we do seem to be hitting a lot of stupid doomsday milestones lately (keyword "stupid")
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It's my understanding that we're not talking about one incident here. Mayan, Aztec and Inca culture was systematically destroyed by the Spanish.
I remember visiting the Museo de America in Madrid thinking I'll see the robbed cultural treasures of the region but no, there just is very little left. It was all intentionally destroyed.
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It's like the Spaniards and British were fighting to be the worst empires in human history. My word
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say? I'm not Ars Technica. And I was referring to the Mayan organizers of this knowledge, and purposely used various titles to indicate I didn't know offhand what they called their "wise men". I wasn't referring to the people studying them.
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Most daykeepers would have been little different than astrologers. The detailed observations and calculations for doing things like writing such codices would have been the purview of a small elite.
Interestingly, the Tzolk’in calendar astrology was so fundamental to Mesoamerican cultures that we find people referenced by the Tzolk'in designation of the day they were born.
There was a ruler of Palenque where the only name we find for him in inscriptions is "11 Rabbit", representing that he was born on that day. Well... archaeologists originally called him "Casper" because the hieroglyph of his name looks an awful lot like a cartoon ghost, but that's sort of different.
There was a much later king of Mixtec who was referenced in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall as 8 Deer Jaguar Claw. Again, "8 Deer" would be the Tzolk'in destination for the day of his birth.
Interestingly, the Tzolk’in calendar astrology was so fundamental to Mesoamerican cultures that we find people referenced by the Tzolk'in designation of the day they were born.
There was a ruler of Palenque where the only name we find for him in inscriptions is "11 Rabbit", representing that he was born on that day. Well... archaeologists originally called him "Casper" because the hieroglyph of his name looks an awful lot like a cartoon ghost, but that's sort of different.
There was a much later king of Mixtec who was referenced in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall as 8 Deer Jaguar Claw. Again, "8 Deer" would be the Tzolk'in destination for the day of his birth.
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And yet they've both been eclipsed by the latest US administration.
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Only 20 countries in the world haven’t been invaded by the British empire so it really isn’t as cut and dry as you might presume
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I mean if the test is “invaded” rather than “much of the population of two continents literally enslaved and governed with such poor civil institutions that hundreds of years later their successor governments still struggle to deliver democracy”, then I guess you have a point.
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yeah, but why. i dont like the britts colonial arrogance, but spaniards were on another level. was this a catholic indoctrination or greed...
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22 Apparently. Andorra and the Vatican City wouldn't be high on anyone's list, I suspect.
Mongolia and the Central Asian republics only really on Imperial Russia's and China's to-invade lists.
Rockall Island was probably their last imperial acquisition although unenthusiastically contested by Ireland.
Belarus (White Russia) is on the list on the list but probably only on a technicality as I think British forces were sent there ca 1920 but under the Brest-Litovst Treaty it was probably technically occupied by Germany.
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But enough about Russia (or, if you wish to go a bit bigger and a bit farther back, Genghis Khan and successor khanates).I mean if the test is “invaded” rather than “much of the population of two continents literally enslaved and governed with such poor civil institutions that hundreds of years later their successor governments still struggle to deliver democracy”, then I guess you have a point.
Anyway, a simple count of invaded countries based on what countries exist today does not take into account the countless tribes, nations, cultures that were first subjugated, then more or less fully assimilated, then the remnants annihilated. Many such cases.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Looks at China... and Italy... yeah, tomato sauce didn't original in Italy, nor did noodles in China. Give back the recipes!! /s
Its history. It can be rewritten. Gulf of
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Which is a shame, to put it super mildly. Little doubt that things like this and losing the Mouseion/Library of Alexandria set humanity back in truly incalculable ways. The ancients had already documented much that subsequent generations have had to rediscover.
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The Maya didn't actually make that doomsday date prediction; it's not in the codexes or anything the Classical Maya ever wrote. The doomsday thing is a modern interpretation, and mostly rejected by the people who actually study this.
Also, the Classical Maya occasionally used higher order long count numbers, so they would have been prepared for the end of the era. Which means they would have had a big party in 2012. The next day, they would have slapped another digit in front of the Long Count. Presumably while they were still hung over.
Which doesn't mean that, had Classical Maya civilization continued uninterrupted to the present day, that some of them wouldn't have freaked out around 2012. Kind of like people in Western Civilization did before the years 1000 and 2000. I do suspect Maya programmers in this universe would have had their own version of the Y2K problem, though.
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As though that was the only thing I wrote. So we’re left with you lacking any response except to try make some dumb comment referencing two words out of my longer comment. Way to show your deep knowledge of the topic and put me in my place. Well played.
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You're missing Czech Republic aka for historical purposes Kingdom of Bohemia.
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They wouldn’t have even have needed another digit. December 2012 was the end of the 13th baktun. 13 is a significant number in Mayan numerology, but the system is base-20. It wouldn’t need another digit added for another few thousand years.
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There is plenty of competition in that race from empires all around the world
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There was that, but part of it was that Spain got there first, while there was more worth ruining. Britain was about a century behind, and arrived to find a population already decimated by Spanish-introduced diseases, and the formerly gold-rich civilizations already destroyed. Had Britain arrived in Mexico before the Spaniards did, would the outcome have been significantly different?
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I'm not an expert on calendars or timekeeping. I only know the stuff that anyone with a degree in astronomy inevitably picks up. From that I knew that Mayan astronomy and timekeeping was both advanced and a little weird, but I never realized how advanced and weird until now.
A great example of the weirdness is learning that the Mayans had a 260 day calendar. What? Why? I can't think of any natural cycles that would sync up with. That includes simple fractions and multiples. After a little digging I see that it is 20 days (the number of fingers and toes on a human, so that is understandable) times 13. Why 13? And that still doesn't tell me what you would actually do with a 260 day calendar. The article says they used it in their eclipse calculations, but was that a pattern they found based on an existing 260 day calendar, or was one created purely for the purposes of eclipse calculations?
Another weirdness is that I didn't spot anything in the article that would match up with the saros cycle (18 years, 11 days, 8 hours). The saros cycle is the bedrock of how western astronomers track eclipses. Did the Mayans somehow figure out how to make accurate eclipse predictions without discovering it, or did the article just not mention it?
I suppose I might find answers to these questions with more digging than I feel like doing, but instead I would like to finish by pointing out where the Mayans impressed me. Finding these patterns would have required centuries upon centuries of accurate observations and detailed calculations. Mayan civilization was both more advanced and several times older than I had ever realized.
A great example of the weirdness is learning that the Mayans had a 260 day calendar. What? Why? I can't think of any natural cycles that would sync up with. That includes simple fractions and multiples. After a little digging I see that it is 20 days (the number of fingers and toes on a human, so that is understandable) times 13. Why 13? And that still doesn't tell me what you would actually do with a 260 day calendar. The article says they used it in their eclipse calculations, but was that a pattern they found based on an existing 260 day calendar, or was one created purely for the purposes of eclipse calculations?
Another weirdness is that I didn't spot anything in the article that would match up with the saros cycle (18 years, 11 days, 8 hours). The saros cycle is the bedrock of how western astronomers track eclipses. Did the Mayans somehow figure out how to make accurate eclipse predictions without discovering it, or did the article just not mention it?
I suppose I might find answers to these questions with more digging than I feel like doing, but instead I would like to finish by pointing out where the Mayans impressed me. Finding these patterns would have required centuries upon centuries of accurate observations and detailed calculations. Mayan civilization was both more advanced and several times older than I had ever realized.
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Well, RFK Jr., Trump and Musk are also European invaders, and they are still bent on destroying North Americn science.
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The British Empire in India, however, did not destroy Indian cultures. They actually made them more accessible, though I'm not for one moment excusing the looting. The Koh-i-Noor should certainly have been returned long ago.
There are various cultural reasons for this but one of them is the defeat of Catholic imperialism in the UK itself in 1688, and the relative tolerance of the Church of England. With the loss of the temporal power of the Pope, and the rise of the Jesuits, Catholic missionary activity did get more inclusive, and recent culturally destructive Christian supremacy has mainly been US Protestant - in Brazil, for instance, and parts of Africa.
Putting aside the USA - which had its worst native genocides post independence - and Australia, the British Empire was on the whole less destructive than the Catholic one (since you can't really separate Spain and Portugal when it comes to South America.)
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As someone who grew up on the traditional American educational structure of Western Civilization and its Old World myopia, learning more and more about the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas has been a fascinating experience. It's especially interesting contrasting what developed similarly and what played out differently.
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Also aspects such as accidents of geology. What would the British relationship with the various Algonquians have looked like if huge silver deposits had been found in the Adirondacks? M IIRC, the worst Spanish deprivations related to the conscripted mine labor for silver mines.
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