A brand new guide, "Astronomy from the Maya Codices" (American Philosophical Society, 2011), which was awarded the Osterbrock Guide Prize for historical astronomy right here with the American Astronomical Society conference on Monday, facts a series of remarkable observations created by pre-16th century Maya astronomers.
Anthropologist husband-wife group Harvey and Victoria Bricker have devoted their lives to knowing the pre-Columbian Maya and the way they understood the entire world all around them. The Brickers performed the vast majority of their perform by translating complicated hieroglyphics to discover what Maya scribes felt was most critical to record on parchment.
By decoding early Mayan hieroglyphics from 4 distinctive codices housed in Madrid, Paris, Mexico and Dresden, the Brickers tracked how the evening sky would have looked for the Mayans whenever they have been alive.
"We're coping with serious information," Harvey Bricker explained. "They're not only squiggles."
The Brickers translated the dates cited from the Maya calendar to correspond with our calendar and after that employed modern-day information of planetary orbits and cycles to line up the Maya's information with ours. It had been remarkably correct.
The truth is, the Brickers discovered the astronomical calendar dated towards the 11th or 12th century accurately predicted a solar eclipse to inside of per day in 1991, centuries following the Maya civilization had ended. The 1991 eclipse occurred on July 11.The group also identified the Maya had a fair quantity of superstitions surrounding observable heavenly bodies within the evening sky. To the friendly side, they'd the sun along with the moon ?a a god and goddess, respectively ?a whose cycles had been simple to map, predict and maintain track of. During the not-so-friendly camp have been Venus and Mars. The motions of people two planets normally signaled doom and destruction determined by their area while in the sky, the Brickers uncovered.
The manuscripts warned that if Venus shines on small children, old women and men or healthful youthful males at specific factors in its orbit, then harm would come to them.
Since the Maya needed to produce positive these possibly risky moments did not interfere with all the lives of their people today, Harvey Bricker stated, they kept particularly in depth records of exactly where Venus as well as other planets appeared inside the evening sky on specified days.
Mars ?a an animalistic god ?a signified gloomy days to come for everyone. "There was believed to get a partnership, and never a delighted a single, involving phenomena linked with Mars and agriculture," Harvey Bricker stated.
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