Ever since archaeologists found the ancient Mayan calendars, people have been trying to decipher their meaning. The problem was the fact that the cycle in the calendars covers a birth of 819 days, and the experts could not compare that period with anything. At least until now. Namely, anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University claim that they have finally solved this mystery.
Anthropologists "expanded" the period of consideration, that is, analyzed how the calendar works over a period of 45 years, not just 819 days, and related it to the synodic period, the time it takes for a celestial body to return to approximately the same point in the sky, as seen from Earth.
"Although previous research had attempted to relate the 819-day calendar to the positions of the planets, its four-part scheme was too short to fit well with the synodic periods of the visible planets. When we extended the calendar to 20 periods of 819 days, a pattern emerged in which the synodic periods of all visible planets are proportional to the points in the calendar," the anthropologists state, as quoted by the Index.
Colors are also important
The ancient Mayan calendar is actually a complicated system consisting of smaller calendars, created in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. It is based on glyphs (signs) and is repeated four times, with each block of 819 days corresponding to one of four colors and, scientists first thought, geographical directions.
Red was associated with the east, white with the north, black with the west, and yellow with the south. It wasn't until the 1980s that experts realized that this assumption was incorrect. Instead, white and yellow indicate zenith and nadir (an interpretation that fits astronomy), writes Science Alert.
There were other factors that suggested that the number 819 was associated with the synodic periods of the visible planets of the solar system. For example, the Maya had extremely precise measurements of the synodic periods of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
However, it was difficult to figure out how these synodic periods worked in the context of the 819-day calendar. Mercury did not pose too much of a problem, because it has a synodic period of 117 days, that is exactly seven times in those 819. But what about the other planets?
Everything matches
If we extend the calendar to a longer period, it turns out that each of the visible planets has a synodic period that exactly matches the number of cycles of 819 days. The synodic period of Venus is 585 days and this coincides with 7 sequences of 819 days. Mars has a synodic period of 780 days, which is exactly 20 periods of 819 days.
The same applies to Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's synodic period of 399 days fits exactly 39 times in 19 sequences, and Saturn's period of 378 days fits six sequences perfectly.
There is even a plausible connection to the 260-day calendar known as the Tzolkʼin (Colkin). Twenty periods of 819 days total 16.380 days. If you multiply Tzolk'in 63 times, you get 16.380 days. In fact, 16.380 is the least common denominator of 260 and 819. So the two tie in nicely with the 20 cycle count of 819 days set forth by Linden and Bricker.
"Expanding the standard cycle of 4×819 days to 20 periods of 819 days provides a larger calendar system with scales for the synodic periods of all the visible planets. "Instead of focusing narrowly on each planet, the 'astronomers' of that period created an 819-day calendar and envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used to predict the synodic periods of all visible planets," the scientists said.
The research, titled "The Maya 819-Day Count and Planetary Astronomy," was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
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