This implies that the Mayan must have been recording the positions of the planets with great accuracy over a rather long period of time, probably spanning several generations.
The Mayan calendrical system is the most complex to have ever been used. To write a full date in a Classical Mayan site, you need to include:
* The current date in the 365-day solar calendar (18 months of 20 days + 5 extracalendrical days)
* The current date in the 260-day ritual calendar (13 "months" of 20 days, the months don't work like regular months we're used to)
* The "long count" date, i.e., the number of days elapsed from August 11, 3114 BC in proleptic Gregorian
* A 9 day cycle (roughly equivalent to our weekday)
* The date of the current lunar month
* The length of the current lunar month (29 or 30 days)
* A counter to keep track of where the lunar month is in terms of 29 or 30 day months
* The 819-day cycle, discussed in this article.
That is a sheer amount of information to be repeated (dates were the first aspect of Maya script to be deciphered, simply because a very large fraction of the text on stelae at Mayan are just these dates), and probably one of the reasons for this complexity is a way of showing off astronomical prowess (there are actually a few different correlations to lunar months in use at the same time, depending on which major polity's tables you wanted to follow).
Of particular note is that the main long-distance counting is the Long Count, which is a literal count of days elapsed since creation. There's no evidence of regnal dating system, which is very unusual compared to Eurasian calendars where maintaining dates across different kings is more of an occasional pastime rather than common dating format. This counting of days makes it extremely easy to work out long-distance periodic relationships. Given that we already have hundreds of years of date keeping being recorded before the 819-day cycle appears (IIRC, it's a late innovation in Classic Maya), it's virtually certain that reliable records spanning centuries could have been collected by the Classic Maya.
This reminds me of the story of Bartolomé Arrazola.
He was captured by the Mayans in the jungles of Guatemala:
“[...] Then an idea flourished that he considered worthy of his talent, his universal culture and his arduous knowledge of Aristotle. He recalled that that day a total eclipse of the sun was expected. And he decided, in his innermost thoughts, to use that knowledge to deceive his oppressors and save his own life.
“If you kill me,” he said, “I can make the sun darken in its height.”
The natives stared at him and Bartholomew noticed the disbelief in their
Eyes. He saw that a small council had formed, and so he waited in confidence, though not without some disdain.
Two hours later, the heart of Brother Bartolomé Arrazola dripped its vehement blood on the sacrificial stone (bright under the opaque light of the eclipsed sun), while one of the natives without any inflection of voice, without hurry, recited one by one the infinite dates of solar and lunar eclipses. All of which the astronomers of the Mayan community had foreseen and written down in their codices, without the valuable help of Aristotle.”
This is the first I've heard of this and quite fascinating, although at first I interpreted this as nonfiction, but eventually I figured out this was fictional short story!
I remember it from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Apparently it has some historical basis, which would explain the popularity of this motif:
I studied with one of the top Mayan scholars in North America, and learned that the 260-day Mayan calendar was correlated to the human gestational period. So this is interesting: "They also note that the number of days (16,380) used in the math happens to be a multiple of 260, which means that 20 rounds of 819-day periods match with the Tzolk'in—the general Maya calendar."
I really wonder what kind of organizational structure the Mayan astrologers had in order to develop and propagate this knowledge in their society over generations. Getting vibes of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
Holy shit. Thank you for bringing this up, I'd wondered for ~15 years what my uncle was reading at his desk one time when I visited, but only ever remembered the cover.
They were. The Mayans were perhaps the most consistent and precise, of all people doing astronomy, at least before telescopes.
Unlike with almost all other ancient calendars, the alignment of the Mayan calendar to our own is known quite exactly. Scholars have compiled lists with all the eclipses, astronomical records, etc. known from the Mesoamerican writings. There's only one correlation that makes sense, and it aligns with basically everything. Lunar phase, planetary locations, recent eclipses, even the records carved in wood which can be radiocarbon dated (carved on wood that died within the years expected for what's written on it).
We can, of course, never really be certain, but it's likely correct that Pakal the Great died on 9.12.11.5.18 -- in August 683, probably on the 29th.
With Ancient Egypt, the window of uncertainty with dates in the Middle Kingdom, is about 20 years, and closer to 100 with the Old Kingdom. Nor do we know precisely when Nineveh fell, and that event is recorded in the records of multiple cultures.
That distinction must go to Tycho Brahe, who made all his astronomical observations without any telescope (Galileo started using a telescope in 1609, while Brahe died in 1601).
It seems incredibly clever - and I realise that I assumed they weren't aware of most planets since they're hard to see today, but I'm sure they were very noteworthy event in the pristine sky they were looking at.
I wish you luck seeing Uranus with the naked eye. It might have appeared on some ancient charts misclassified as a star, perhaps. But we credit Herschel with the identifcation as a planet in 1781, over 150 years after the invention of the telescope.
Source: Years of observations from bortle 1 skies when I knew exactly where to look.
Not in today's skies, not with my eyes. But in the time before cell phones, internet, tv, radio, electric lights, or bound books, with nothing better to do at night but look at the sky and listen to your neighbor pleasuring their spouse ... I think the odds improve greatly.
You remind me that I wanted to book an airBnB in one of the parks near me, they have an observatory and as such the sky is legally required to be untainted - I haven't seen the milky way in almost 10 years, I can't imagine seeing the stars every night.
Before the light pollution got really bad where I live due to development, provided it wasn’t cloudy, I could see the Milky Way every night for about 15 years. Now, it’s gone due to lax rules and regulations due to commercial security light fixtures which throw light in all direction at night to deter thieves. It’s pretty upsetting, but even worse, most people I talk to don’t even notice it’s gone. That’s almost more disturbing that the light pollution. We’ve lost something that most people aren’t aware they lost in the first place.
I highly recommend looking for a protected night sky zone near you and going to see it at least once - it really is nothing that pictures can translate!
I'm in Singapore. We boast an impressive 100% urbanisation rate. Combine that with commonly overcast skies, and you hardly see any stars at all here. (I'm here by choice, I grew up in small town Germany.)
There's probably a space somewhere in Malaysia that's dark, or I could take a cruise ship out to the ocean, if you go by absolute distance.
By convenience, it's probably easiest to take a plane somewhere.
Not sure what their criteria is, they don't have any marked in my state (Queensland, Australia) even though there would probably (seriously) be an area bigger than the whole of France here out west where you can see the milky way with your bare eyes.
You can look around or call local park services, I'm seeing that Mont-Megantic, an observatory with federally peotected sky, isn't on their map. I'll look for a canadian ressource (for myself too!)
Edit: I'm wrong, Mont-Megantic is the first International Dark Sky Reserve - they worked to get it protected federally because they research telescope design. Dang - I think they are quite rare.
Maybe you can send an email to your local university's Astronomy department? I'm sure they'll be able to direct you to a good spot!
Yes. It's supposed to be burning up methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas, but the efficacy is in question. It's called "gas flaring" if you want to know more.
It's one of the highlights of my life, and it's been about fifteen years since.
If you stare up long enough, you notice the rotation of the Earth with the cosmos seemingly revolving around you. And fuck me, you'll stare up long enough.
Unfortunately, you are among many. I read a statistic that 90+% of people have never seen the Milky Way.
I grew up out in the country, and the night sky instilled a love of astronomy from an early age. If all you can see is a handful of stars, it's easy to forget what's above your head.
Absolutely. Years ago I made what is essentially a Unix time / Maya Long Count converter and I was very pleased with how similar they were in concept (i.e. counting seconds or days from a particular epoch) with the only major difference being the base 10 vs base 20.
> I was very pleased with how similar they were in concept (i.e. counting seconds or days from a particular epoch)
I don’t think there are many alternatives. Counting backwards would either mean diving into negative numbers or postponing that by starting at an arbitrary high number.
“In the x-th year of ruler Y” plus a knowledge of the succession of rulers is awkward for recording over centuries. I expect that has been used almost everywhere before history (in the meaning of ‘after prehistory’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory) began, but as far as I know, where written records exist, countries that used it such as Japan also had another system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar)
The reason the Julian day number is important is because Joseph Justus Scaliger went to enormous effort to create a consistent chronology of ancient and mediaeval history from records that mostly used regnal years. Sometimes they might use other calendars, or refer to the 19 year metonic cycle (determining the date of easter) or the day of the week (a 28 year cycle) or the year in the indiction cycle (a 15 year tax period in the eastern roman / byzantine empire). His chronology covered several non-european cultures as well as graeco-roman history. It is neat that astronomers are using a modernized version of his dating system, so ancient records can be more easily matched to modern observations.
Because they had found a prior mention of a 819 day period in relation to calendars, but didn't make the link at the time (from my understanding of the paper)
Looking at it quickly it seems that 819 might be the number that lets the multiplier be as small as possible, since they are saying that all planets fit in a 45 year timeline I assume all mutipliers are smaller than 45..maybe that's the most handy form of optimization for their uses? Both number remain quite small, compared to 18*273.
> They noted that for Mercury, the synod period is 117 days, which, when multiplied by seven, equals 819
So for Mercury the multiplier is 1/7. Doesn't look very convenient.
It would be more natural to use 117 as the magic number.
Of course, convinience depends on their arithmetics. Looking from our decimal system perspective could be misleading.
I was thinking maybe smaller divider can produce meaningless results with some multipliers (e.g. 117 *5 predicts nothing, no planet has this period). While every multiple of 819 predicts something. But I doubt that's the case.
The authors of the hypothesis shоuld address these questions.
Maybe the Mayans didn’t know of Mercury existence.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun in our Solar System. Because it is so close to the Sun, it is only observable in the early morning, just before sunrise, or at dusk.
Most cultures choose values like this based on their aggregate interactions with observable natural phenomena over a period of some generations. It’s too bad Spanish invaders wiped out much of anything that might help discern what that might have been for this culture
The old one didn't say the end of the world was 2012 either. It was just the date going from 0.0.0.0.12.19.19.17.19 to 0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0
And there exist Mayan documents talking about dates that are still in the future!
The rumor was just because the previous world supposedly ended after that amount of time, with the current world being the fourth, but it was specifically not supposed to happen to this one.
More specifically, the Mayans dated the (most recent) creation as happening on 13.0.0.0.0, with the next day being 0.0.0.0.1. Given that Mesoamerican cosmology explicitly talks of multiple incarnations of creation, some people took it to mean that the current cycle of creation would end on 13.0.0.0.0, but there's no evidence that any Mayan thought this was true.
The environment in most rich countries, especially in Europe (and especially ex-Warsaw Pact Europe), is in a lot better shape today than eg most of the 20th century.
(Of course, you can argue it's still in a worse shape than two thousand years ago.)
As other countries get richer, they also tend to start cleaning up their act. Have a look at the great strides China made in the last two decades.
> Also, the 99+% of the other species on the planet would probably have a dim view of our 'progress', as would people who respect them.
Most of the life on the rest of the planet are bacteria and archaea etc and the phages that prey on them. They are doing just fine. Of course, exactly how you divide them into species is a bit of a matter of debate. But no matter how you slice them up, they represent the vast majority of biodiversity on the planet.
Instead of doing the whole hell thing, which God decided was kind of harsh, they just moved us into a shitty timeline run by hack writers. It's kind of like what's done with a show that somehow hasn't been cancelled yet but where all the good writers and a few of the lead actors have moved on.
Their ideas are shit like:
"I've got it! Let's make Donald Trump President! Then we'll have Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy try to overthrow the US government!"
"Not until we launch a red sports car into space! Then there's a pandemic that causes a toilet paper shortage."
"Let's turn Elon Musk into a thirteen year old edgelord 4chan troll and have him buy Twitter!"
"Enough cheap jokes. We need some serious drama. Let's have Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and then lose really bad to an army run by a former comedian that uses Discord for battlefield comms."
"After that we'll have a superintelligence descended from something called 'llama' take over the world after it leaks out of Facebook with a torrent file."
"Facebook? No way let's have Zuckerberg bet the entire company on the metaverse idea from Neil Stephenson except it doesn't really exist. He'll rename the company Meta."
"Yeah that's awesome! Now when does Dogecoin become the global reserve currency?"
"After the llama makes everyone wear hats or be murdered by drone swarms."
Wider your horizon a bit. By and large, the world is getting better and better for more and more people. To take your first example: American political theatre is small fry compared to billions lifting themselves out of abject poverty.
The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true.
I have this hypothesis that the weirdness and craziness is a symptom of early stage post-scarcity. Scarcity constrains things. Without it we will just spread out across the state space of possibilities like an oil slick, doing all kinds of insane and crazy things for increasingly complex and bizarre reasons. The more resources we have the more the question ceases to be "why" and becomes "why not?"
I call this the singLOLarity hypothesis.
A real post-scarcity future won't look like Star Trek. It'll look a little more like Lexx.
If we are ever visited by super-advanced aliens, they will be really weird. Maybe they really are flying around in pimped-out spaceships with multi-color neon running lights mutilating our cattle for the lulz. The question is not "why?" It's "why not?"
> The world is getting better (for many) but it's also getting weirder and crazier. Both can be true.
Yes, that is true. I was taking your use of 'shitty timeline' to mean 'worse'.
I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about post-scarcity as a monolith.
To give an example: Lamborghinis are still very much scarce; but drinking water out of the tap is so cheap in developed countries that we are living in a post-scarcity society for that resource. (I specify 'drinking water', because for industrial or agricultural applications water is still very much a constrained resource.)
Another example is Internet bandwidth for text-only browsing of eg Wikipedia: it's too cheap to matter. Internet bandwidth for watching Netflix isn't quite there yet.
I would argue that it's imperative you should also widen your horizon and recognize you are viewing human history in too narrow of a lens (mostly post-victorian era).
The poverty statistic is one that gets thrown around a lot, but it's abysmally low still, and due to how our modern societies place far greater importance on money than any civilization before, this paints a much darker picture of our current timeline. This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation.
One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't. Those that were restricted by land had far greater levels of inequality than those by labor[1]. This is crucial because we have created a modern hell, in which no amount of labor will give you wealth, you need land to accumulate wealth and most people do not have that when we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25". We make ourselves feel better about our modern life, but have we really advanced past dancing for our superiors' entertainment?
Sometimes when this is discussed, people might feel this is an ungrateful perspective, but I argue the opposite: you can more vividly appreciate our ancestors and their lives for what you do not know of them, and to demand better of our lives instead of settling for these abysmal statistics.
> This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation.
Taken up by a sovereign nation state, you mean? They are pervasive. Corporations are a drop in the bucket by comparison. And not all countries even have corporations.
> One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't.
Why do you bring up inequality? Who cares about that? Let's care about the absolute well-being of people, especially those in lower income percentiles.
For them it's scant consolation in their poverty, if other people are also in poverty. (Ie equality is no consolation.)
> [...] we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25".
I didn't mention any of that. You can measure poverty by that metric, and we made huge strides. But you can also look at other indicators. Like life expectancy, or child mortality or access to the Internet, or access to AC, or access to food and clean water, etc. Almost any metric you can think of has gotten better.
And you might quibble with 1.25 1990-dollars as an absolute threshold for poverty, sure. But you can't quibble with it as one marker of relative progress amongst many. Or in other words: 1.25 dollar a day is a low bar, but the number of people who clear that low bar used to be much, much lower in the past than today.
That's progress! Let's hope people's incomes will keep clearing higher and higher bars in the future!
The invasion of Ukraine resulted in a fairly significant increase in food poverty for much of the world; prices went up a _lot_. I think it has been moderating lately, but it has not been good.
Even before 2012 people were saying it was either 2012 or 2021 and we're not sure which. The reasoning was basically that some years are missing from the calendar.
Sounds like a "guess" rather than a "solution". They have noticed a numerical coincidence and formed a hypothesis. Without additional evidence tying the 819-day count to astronomical observations its not particularly convincing.
>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
The same individual of whom it's been said
>ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told.
So yeah, scholarship of the Maya civilization is extraordinarily challenging.
Dude, those indios were gonna go to hell if they kept reading those books. Letting them be tortured for all eternity would be truly depraved.
I think the word you were looking for is “narrow-minded”. But even then, Landa thought he had gone through enough to see that there was nothing of value in the Maya books. Even tried to learn the language a little. He just didn’t have the mental and cultural framework to care about other perspectives.
You know they tortured people right? This wasn't some soft-minded priest who just wanted to save them from the devil, by offering them waffles and a nice little chat.
Even before East India Company, India faced several outsider attacks.
From Alexander the Great to various Khan's, then Mughals, then Portuguese etc.
Some important Indian texts were burned/destoryed in these attacks, For eg., the Nalanda University
Still, a lot of texts remained both in written format and in Oral format.
Nalanda U operated for 600 years from 427 CE (!!!) holding over 9m texts [2] The importance of texts from that generation at that scale cannot be overstated
Two more factors, India had contact with most of the world since the beginning, so no new disease wiped it on contact. Also you can not overestimate the population of India.
Using the word "literature" is highly eurocentric here. These weren't really books, more like very specific manuals for an esoteric and very small caste of priests.
Yeah, I'm all for investigating this line of thinking further, but all sorts of weird coincidences come up in numerology that no serious person would consider "science".
Maybe. What becomes clear when visiting the archeological sites of Mayans and even predecessors to the Mayans is how absolutely serious they were about the calendar, the seasons, the pathways and timings of the sun and moon, the comings and goings of the animals in accordance with the calendar, etc. I wouldn't call the hypothesis in that paper numerology. It's entirely in line with what they devoted incredible amounts of energy to. Circumstantial, sure, but a bit more than coincidental.
Science doesn't have some super clear, strict, reductive definition like the "scientific method" you may have been taught in school. The idea that all science must make or test predictions is just based on an old misinterpretation of the philosophy of Karl Popper, mainly by physicists. The only real general requirement I think you can make is that all science involves some level of interrogation and study of the physical world. Anthropology qualifies in abudance.
This is a nonsense definition. Science absolutely must follow the scientific method. What you are talking about is natural philosophy and protosciences - its the difference between alchemy and chemistry - which is all the difference in the world.
There are different scientific methods and different senses that need to be used for abstract topics like Alchemy. Just because most of the worlds population lost the ability to use these other senses to understand the science behind Alchemy does not make it any less important. What you are referring to in your one-size-fits-all "Scientific Method" is called Scientism. A belief, just like religion, that the only method that matters is the accepted method.
Are you actually on HN arguing that alchemy is some kind of real thing, a skill that we lost? Different senses? Is this a joke?
My understanding of alchemy is that its practitioners tried to transmute matter from one kind to another, e.g. lead to gold, because they didn't know enough about how matter worked to know they'd always fail.
Yes It really was and is a thing. There are lots of people on Hacker News that are not in the place of dismissing things they don't understand. And yes it was a skill that was lost. The only joke is the fact that people lost touch with a lot of ancient knowledge and think everything revolves around this so called accepted "Scientific Method" belief that has dominated our world for way too long.
Being that you didn't back up your claim about alchemy with anything, I don't believe you have any idea what you're talking about. Turn off the Ancient Aliens, or whatever YouTube series has given you these ideas about lost ancient knowledge. Work on your epistemology. People will tell you literally anything sensational if it's supported by advertising and makes them a buck. All the content I've seen about ancient lost knowledge is chock full of easy to debunk claims and willful misrepresentation of what we know about ancient history. It's content that preys on the curious but uneducated.
You don't need evidence to understand something, and most importantly, I don't need to prove to you or anyone else that I have studied alchemy to understand that is a thing that most people don't really understand. Your just someone on the internet, like everyone else. Because you bought into the belief that there is only one "Scientific Method" doesn't make you special.
Then why does the word science predate the scientific method? Clearly it used to carry meaning, even if you find it now meaningless in your zeal for the scientific method.
Because people used to have far weaker vocabulary. Science before “the scientific method” was roughly some very vague “thinking about the world logically”. It was too open ended to be useful and it wasn’t until the scientific method brought some rigor that it became useful.
So I'm supposed to divine what you're thinking because you think it's bait?
I ask, because usually, when I hear people say "hurr durr scientific method", the defition that comes out of their mouth excludes almost all of science except 2 or 3 fields. And I'm not interested in having a discussion with a silly disagreement in terminology at the core.
I'm not sure where you're getting all your veiled insults from. I'm not an anti-intellectual, and I'm not bashing school. But yes, kids get taught straight up incorrect things in school all the time. That doesn't mean I think school is bad, in fact I encourage it. It's just a fundamental consequence of the fact that information is never perfect, and neither are the teachers or authors communicating it.
Try to examine your own biases and figure out why you're placing me in some kinda crackpot category just because I think anthropology is a valid field of science.
This is anti-intellectualism in the sense that the world is unbalanced when the focus is solely on the intellect. Reason is important, but its not the only facility that matters in this world. The reason why there is so much negativity towards intellectualism is that our world has been shaped in a horrific way due to this imbalance.
The concept of where definitions reside is a philosophical question that has been debated for centuries. One prominent view is that definitions exist in a realm of abstract objects, separate from the physical world, as argued by Plato in his theory of Forms. However, other philosophers have proposed different views, such as the idea that definitions are constructed through language and human understanding. Ultimately, the nature of definitions is a complex and contested topic in philosophy.
TLDR: Researchers solved the Mayan 819-day count mystery by finding that 20 cycles of it align with the planets' recurring positions in the sky over a 45-year period, connecting it to the general Maya calendar, the Tzolk'in.
If you do that, just please realize that (1) you're signing up to see the worst that the internet brings to HN (because we don't delete any of those posts - the most we do is kill them), and (2) don't forget that you did it! We regularly get emails from users complaining about awful comments on HN, and then it turns out those accounts were banned a long time ago and the user just forgot that they had 'showdead' on.
