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Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
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Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#22“Unfortunately, much of this knowledge – and the texts that contained it – was destroyed during the Spanish Inquisition, leaving only a few bits and pieces from which to reconstruct these advanced methods for celestial prediction.“
Not the Inquisition, which happened on a different continent!
Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#23“Unfortunately, much of this knowledge – and the texts that contained it – was destroyed during the Spanish Inquisition, leaving only a few bits and pieces from which to reconstruct these advanced methods for celestial prediction.“ Not the Inquisition, which happened on a different continent!
It's the shorter name of the agency, which indeed also operated in America
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
> The inquisition expanded to other domains under the Spanish Crown, including Southern Italy and the Americas, while also targeting those accused of alumbradismo, Protestantism, witchcraft, blasphemy, bigamy, sodomy, Freemasonry, etc.
Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#241491 ... if you have never read it was very eye opening as to how badass all these civilizations were. Their loss today would be similar to as if we suddenly lost 99% of all China.
The evidence is being expanded over time. And it feels like the scale on every dimension is always being revised upward.
For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region.
There are a handful of fragmentary inscriptions - only three or four from two or three sites - in a script that isn't Maya [0]. It has a similar logogram + syllable structure to Maya. Stylistically it has the whole glowering angry sideways faces thing going on too.
It is obviously culturally related. No one can confidently decode it, at least partly due to the limited fragmentary nature of the corpus. But if you read it like it phonetically were Maya based on the subset of common glyphs -- it does seem a lot like it might be a Mixe-Zoque language. Or more accurately, something distantly related to the ancestor of the modern Mixe-Zoque languages.
While no one can read the text, one of the fragments has a date in the same long count calendar the Maya used which we can read: 7.16.6.16.18 -- September 1 32 BC. This aligns well with the context in which it was found, about 2000 years old.
There are yet another set of these head symbol glyphs associated with yet another site (Teotihuacan [1]) and yet another extinct culture (the area had long been controlled by the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived). It seems to be the writing system of another people who were prominent and ruled a large area from Teotihuacan at their peak around perhaps 100 - 500 AD. The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec. But it may be a distant relative of the ancestor of Nahuatl. There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2]
There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script. Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after. We're now as far back as 1500 BC or so.
The scope and span! At least three different writing systems. Related. But associated with probably three different spoken language families. And this is over a span of two thousand or more years. Different cultures formed literate empires and city-building civilizations which lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, rising and falling, repeatedly.
The Long Count calendar is sophisticated and reckons an exact count of days from its epoch (generally agreed [4] to be August 11, 3114 BC). It was used regularly for some thousand or more years. It was possibly used by more than one culture / language group at the same time (Maya and whoever made the Isthmian inscriptions). The use of the Long Count is internally consistent: the astronomical observations and archaeological dating by other means generally all is in accord. Only people of the modern era have been so precise and consistent in their time keeping. And not as for long yet.
Getting a bit looser with it: I get an ever-growing feeling that the Mesoamerican civilizations had an intense sense of history and understanding of their own place in time from very early on.
Aside from just finding many more texts, the Holy Grail today would be to discover a bilingual text. Even a tiny fragment would, if nothing else, further confirm the depth of the cultural world that once existed.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscriptio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuaca...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...
Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of these indigenous knowledge systems are essentially memory palaces. It's a way to memorize large amounts of information and map that information on some sort of tangible metaphor. Modern western astrology is pretty divorced from the original practice(s), but the original practice actually used a sidereal clock and actually corresponded to the positions of stars. The stars being an important component for navig…
Additionally, ritual serves a purpose both for individuals and within a broader society - for instance, a bloodletting during a solar eclipse emphasizes both the vulnerability of society to outside affairs (a solar eclipse is a hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer) and the noble’s obligation to society (literally shedding blood to help protect their society). Similar can be seen with some rituals…
While I can understand how the GP's interpretation/wording isn't helpful at all and I understand it being down voted, there still is a kernel of truth in there.
I think their comment is coming from a place of having a very very HN typical but maybe taken to an extreme rational and fact driven "belief" system.
For example, you say that a solar eclipse is a "hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer". Personally, I can understand that rationally. I can understand that many if not most people can or will feel like that.
But I've witnessed multiple solar eclipses in my lifetime and while they were "cool", I had no "hauntingly humbling experience" whatsoever. It's something that happens and that we have a good scientific understanding of as to why and how it happens. End of story.
I can absolutely appreciate how (think final moments of "Pillars of the Earth") great it must have been to know these things, calculate them or at least understand what's happening when it's happening and use them for "population control". Does it benefit societies? Yes, probably on a general/global level. Like how are you gonna rationally explain and get a large populace to deal with end of winter / start of growing season food scarceness? The best and easiest way is to have them believe in your religion and that fasting is something your god requires/encourages. I firmly believe that that's why many major religions include this.
But as "me" in the modern world, it appalls me that someone thinks they can just tell whatever the eff they want and I'm supposed to do it coz "they speak for ".
Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#26isnt it more embarrasing that they believed the sun needed help to reappear? that they mistook the feelings in their head to be real, kind of how people think they can feel or talk to a god? we love to pat ourselves on the back but never take a look at how stupid we actually are, most people most of the time. i feel regularly embarrassed at the mistakes we make
God is all-powerful, eternal, exists outside of space and time, and created us for a purpose - but he's too busy to be bothered by our prayers?
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Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, ritual serves a purpose both for individuals and within a broader society - for instance, a bloodletting during a solar eclipse emphasizes both the vulnerability of society to outside affairs (a solar eclipse is a hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer) and the noble’s obligation to society (literally shedding blood to help protect their society). Similar can be seen with some rituals…
While I can understand how the GP's interpretation/wording isn't helpful at all and I understand it being down voted, there still is a kernel of truth in there. I think their comment is coming from a place of having a very very HN typical but maybe taken to an extreme rational and fact driven "belief" system. For example, you say that a solar eclipse is a "hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer". Pe…
> But I've witnessed multiple solar eclipses in my lifetime and while they were "cool", I had no "hauntingly humbling experience" whatsoever. It's something that happens and that we have a good scientific understanding of as to why and how it happens. End of story.
The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you - that an object a quarter the diameter of our planet a couple hundred thousand miles away from us slid in front of the only real source of light and energy our planet has and temporarily cast us into night, with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever except to wait for the event to pass, that that inspired no awe or reflection in you about our place in the universe, our limitations as people, the degree to which we're subject to forces we have no impact over at all - I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.
Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an optimistic take, but equally valid is the take where delusions provide impetus for some pretty nasty behaviour - eg see the crusades
I had to broaden my view here recently a little bit myself. Worshipping deities has been around for a long time (8000 years?) and mostly involved no crusades, they certainly aren’t universal.
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Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of these indigenous knowledge systems are essentially memory palaces. It's a way to memorize large amounts of information and map that information on some sort of tangible metaphor. Modern western astrology is pretty divorced from the original practice(s), but the original practice actually used a sidereal clock and actually corresponded to the positions of stars. The stars being an important component for navig…
Additionally, ritual serves a purpose both for individuals and within a broader society - for instance, a bloodletting during a solar eclipse emphasizes both the vulnerability of society to outside affairs (a solar eclipse is a hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer) and the noble’s obligation to society (literally shedding blood to help protect their society). Similar can be seen with some rituals…
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Re: Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
#301491 ... if you have never read it was very eye opening as to how badass all these civilizations were. Their loss today would be similar to as if we suddenly lost 99% of all China.
Did China perform daily mass human sacrifice, too?