Oldest Mayan calendar found; goes way beyond 2012

[Marduk]

Everyone knows the world ended 21 October, 2011!

It did
and I was there

 

[morrisgreat]

I was not even worried about 2012 to begin with.

 

[ddt]

It did
and I was there

Did you get the T-shirt?

 

[Marduk]

Did you get the T-shirt?

I had one with Proverbs 26:11 printed on it

As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly

and went out looking for campanites to infiltrate and be filmed with

couldn't find any though, they weren't as vociferous about it in October like they'd been in May, apart from that minor disappointment my holiday in Fla was awesome

 

[Pacal]

Not really. If they were just counting days, then they wouldn't have a roll-over at 18 in the month column. Their digits worked all the way to 20. So if you just wanted to write something like 152399 days in base 20, that would be 19.19.19. But their dates never are written like that, they'd roll over at 18 in position 2, which is exactly what you'd expect if they're writing actually in years and months.

To put it otherwise, if they were counting days in base 20, 0.0.1.0.0 would be 400 days. It's not. It's 360 days. It's exactly that anomaly that actually says that position 3 is actually counting some 360 day years. You can convert that to number of days, of course, but that doesn't mean it's simply a base 20 number of days per se.

That said, it depends which age and calendar we're talking about. Some were more accurate, while some like the Tzolkin at 260 days, weren't even in the same ball-park as the tropical year. But none of them was actually aware of those .25 days at the end, AFAIK.

The closest that comes to it is the Ha'ab calendar, treating the year as exactly 365 days. And yes, it slowly rolls forward through seasons.

That said, yeah, it's complicated. Most Long Count dates are accompanied by the Calendar Round date as extra 4 digits. (I.e., the Ha'ab month and day, and the Tzolkin month and day.) Other dates are expressed as intervals forward or backward from some prophecised date.

I'm well aware that the second position in a Mayan calandar date leaps over when it reaches 360 days or 18 months. Oh and just why would they have 360 days rather than 365 days if they were concerned with the actual length of the year? The fact is the actual numbers in each position in a Mayan calander date is the number of days not the number of years. Exactly why for position number two they selected 360 and not 400 is a bit mysterious but it seems to be because it is a multiple of 20 whereas 365 is not a multiple of 20. Thus the Maya compared to us downgraded the importance of years and substituted days. The ninetenth month "Uyab" of 5 days was completely ignored the great majority of time while giving dates. Mayanologists generally calculate the 3rd position has multiples of 360 days not years at all. And if my reading of the books of Chilliam Balam is anything to go on so did the Maya. Certainly in the Maya's Astrological Universe the conjunctions and repetation of days counted vastly more than the repetition of years.

As for the Tzolkin that has nothing to do with the actual length of the year at all. it is a multiple of 13 day names times 20 day mumbers. The reason why it is 260 days long seems to be because that is the average length of a human pregnancy. The Mesoamericans, which includes the Maya had the Tzolkin Sacred calander and the regular calander go at the same time so dates were often written out with both the Tzolkin date and the regular date. Such dates only started to repeat every c. 256 years and are what is called the short count as against the long count. THe short count sort of shows not that much interest in years as against days.

As for the Mayan awareness of the actual length of the year being c. 365.25. Well the Maya in their monuments give apparant orbital numbers for various heavenly bodies, like Venus. These figures are very accurate and show that the Maya were well aware that the actual year was not 365 days long but c. 365.25. They just choose to ignore that in their calculations of dates.

 

[Pacal]

Well, someone can predict an eclipse or equinox and be unable to predict that they're about to get reamed by the Persians. See, Babylon.

So that the Mayans didn't have clairvoyance to see what the Europeans were about to do, doesn't really refute the idea that they had astronomical knowledge and could predict cosmic events. If that worked as a refutation, it would also refute every single astronomer ever, because they also didn't have clairvoyance.

And really, that's what some of those nutcases are getting at. They postulate that there's some cosmic alignment or some such that the Mayans predicted.

What DOES refute the idea that the Mayans had advanced astronomical knowledge and could predict cosmic events is... looking at what exactly did they know about the sky, and seeing that they actually knew very little. In fact, their knowledge is at most on par with what Egypt and Mesopotamia had circa 3000 BCE.

It took a long time for the Mesoamericans to even figure out that the EARTH's year is 365 days, not 360. (Or for that matter 360 days instead of 260 days.) That 365 day year on par right there with the earliest known Egyptian calendar, except the Mayans took a couple more thousands of years to get there.

They also never figured out the .25 days part of the year, nor how to resync the year to some event like a solstice or equinox. That's something that Mesopotamia had pretty much all along.

Hence basically even the most advanced calendar the Mayans ever had is still unable to predict even what frikken SEASON it will be in 400 years (a baktun), because by then their calendar will have drifted by 100 days. Predicting galactic scale alignments and whatnot, over thousands of years? Sorry, a civilization who can't even figure out the exact length of an Earth cycle, just doesn't have the level of knowledge for that.

Also, it's easy to see that the ONLY "star" they figured out how to track was Venus. You know, the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and Moon, and which everyone we know of was tracking for as long as we have a written history. As soon as the guys in Mesopotamia or Egypt know how to write at all, we see that they were tracking Venus and assigning all sorts of mystical meanings to it. As Inanna, it was the chief deity of Uruk, possibly as early as 4000 BCE, and people were counting days and whatnot about it.

So, you know, whop-de-do, astronomy-wise the Mayans were where the middle east was around 4000 BCE.

Also really the Mayans were strictly at the stage of counting days. And again, only for Venus.

Meanwhile in ancient Europe, and the ancient Middle East they not only expanded to tracking the other planets too, and came up with the epicycles theory and whatnot. The Greeks eventually even made mechanisms like the Antikythera mechanism to automatically calculate and show the positions of those planets. In fact they had even discovered, sorta, elliptic orbits, because their epicycles were eventually based on ellipses.

So, you know, the Greeks in 150 BCE or so COULD tell you at least when the planets in the solar system will align. In fact, they just needed to crank a mechanism for that. The Mayans in 1500 CE couldn't, because they had no model of positions of those planets, nor were they even counting the days for anything but Venus.

THAT is why I wouldn't trust them to predict any cosmic-scale stuff, not the fact that they didn't have clairvoiance to see that they're about to get reamed by the Europeans

It appears that mesoamericans were well aware of the 365 day length of the year for quite some time. the Tun or 360 day "year" was apparantly used because it was a multiple of 20 not because they thought the year was that long. Oh and the Maya observed more than just the apparant orbit of Venus they also observed the apparant orbits of Mars and Jupiter and the positions of various stars at different times of the years. As for the .25 at the end of the year. Well it appears that the Maya were well are that the year was a bit more than 365 days long. They just choose to ignore it. After all given the numerlogical and astological fixactions of the Maya they were not the slightest bit interested in figuring out what season it was in 400 years. They were more intersted in calculating some arcane astronomical / numerlogical repetition or some projected astrological event than figuring out when spring happenned in 400 years.