One of the most intriguing mysteries of our time is the 819-day calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilization. An enigma that has baffled scientists for years has finally been solved by anthropologists at Tulane University.
For a long time, researchers suspected that the Mayan calendar followed astronomical events, particularly the movements of planets in the night sky as seen from Earth, known as planetary “common cycles.” The conjunction period is the time it takes for a planet to appear in the same position in the night sky as observed from Earth.
However, according to a study published in the United States, ancient mesoamerica, the cycles of the Maya calendar cover a much larger period than scholars previously thought. Anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker discovered that by increasing the length of the calendar to 20 cycles of 819 days, patterns emerged that matched the conjunctive cycles of all visible planets, including Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Prior to this discovery, researchers thought the calendar meant four cycles of 819 days, but those periods did not coincide well with the conjunct cycles of all the planets visible to the naked eye. It turns out to take 20 cycles of 819 days, or about 45 years. For the calendar to coincide with the conjunctive cycles of all visible planets.
Within these 20 cycles, each planet goes through several conjunctive cycles: each Mercury cycle, 5 Venus cycles, 6 Saturn cycles, 19 Jupiter cycles, and 20 Mars cycles. Each conjunctive cycle is less than 819 days, but Mercury has conjunctive cycles that occur the full number of times within a single cycle. Combining the cycles makes it possible to predict the planet’s position in the sky.
Linden and Bricker suggest that this knowledge is also linked to important dates and celebrations in ancient Mayan culture. “Instead of focusing on any one planet, the Mayan astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used to predict the conjunctive cycles of all visible planets,” they wrote.
This study is critical to understanding how the ancient Mayans studied astronomy and is part of a decades-long quest to understand the complexities of the ancient Mayan calendar. Anthropologists have gained valuable insight into the astronomical knowledge and practices of the ancient Mayan civilization by solving the mystery behind the 819-day calendar. The discovery also highlights the advanced understanding the Maya had of the night sky and how that knowledge was used to create a sophisticated calendar system that could not only track time but also predict the positions of the planets visible in the sky.
