The ancient Maya were avid astronomers, recording and interpreting every aspect of the sky. They believed that the will and actions of the gods could be read in the stars, moon, and planets, so they dedicated time to doing so, and many of their most important buildings were built with astronomy in mind. The sun, moon, and planets—Venus, in particular—were studied by the Maya.
The Maya and the Sky
The Maya believed that the Earth was the center of all things, fixed and immovable. The stars, moons, sun, and planets were gods; their movements were interpreted as gods traveling between the Earth, the underworld, and other celestial destinations. These gods were greatly involved in human affairs, and so their movements were watched closely. Many events in Maya life were planned to coincide with certain celestial moments. For example, a war might be delayed until the gods were in place, or a ruler might ascend to the throne of a Mayan city-state only when a certain planet was visible in the night sky.
Sun God Kinich Ahau
The sun was of utmost importance to the ancient Maya. The Mayan sun god was Kinich Ahau. He was one of the more powerful gods of the Mayan pantheon, considered an aspect of Itzamna, one of the Mayan creator gods. Some Mayan dynasties claimed to be descended from the sun. The Maya were experts at predicting solar phenomena such as eclipses, solstices, and equinoxes, as well as determining when the sun reached its apex.
The Moon in Maya Mythology
The moon was nearly as important as the sun to the ancient Maya. Mayan astronomers analyzed and predicted the moon’s movements with great accuracy. As with the sun and planets, Mayan dynasties often claimed to be descended from the moon. Mayan mythology generally associated the moon with a maiden, an old woman, and/or a rabbit. A lunar observatory on the island of Cozumel appears to mark the occurrence of the lunar standstill, the varying movement of the moon through the skies.
Venus and the Planets
The Maya were aware of the planets in the solar system—Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter—and tracked their movements. The most important planet by far to the Maya was Venus, which they associated with war. Battles and wars would be arranged to coincide with the movements of Venus, and captured warriors and leaders would likewise be sacrificed according to the position of Venus in the night sky. The Maya painstakingly recorded the movements of Venus and determined that its year, relative to Earth, not the sun, was 584 days long, closely approximating the 583.92 days that modern science has determined.
Finding Time in the Stars
The Maya erected entire buildings to serve as observatories and created detailed tables cataloging the movements of the moon, Mars and other planets. Maya astronomical calculations even accurately dated a 1991 solar eclipse. Observations like these formed the basis for their calendar; the celestial clock provided a reasonably accurate means of measuring the passage of time.
The Maya made use of several interlocking calendars, though they likely didn’t invent them. There are strong similarities between Maya calendars and those used by older Central American civilizations like the Olmec. The Maya appear to have simply expanded upon these.
The Maya used two separate calendars that counted off days, the haab and the tzolk’in (though the latter is a term modern archaeologists bestowed on the calendar; the Maya use several different names for it). The haab consists of 18 months of 20 days each, with another month of five days called the Wayeb, for a total of 365 days. The Wayeb was considered a dangerous time, and the Maya would make offerings and conduct religious observances to ward off ill-fortune. The tzolkin has 260 days, and consists of 20 named days and 13 numbers, with each combination of name and number occurring once.
The Dresden Codex, the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, contains tables charting the movements of Venus, Mars and the Moon. The Maya also calculated the occurrence of lunar eclipses based on observations and tracked the motion of Jupiter and Saturn. The regular motion of the planets likely formed the basis for much of the Maya’s religious calendar, as they aligned important events with the position of the planets in the night sky.
Keeping Time
The haab and tzolk’in calendars are used together to create a cycle called the Calendar Round, which lasts about 52 years, or 18,980 days. That number is the least common multiple of 260 and 365, or the first point at which the two calendars meet. After one Calendar Round is finished, another begins.
Because the intertwined haab and tzolk’in repeat every 52 years, the Maya needed another way to keep track of longer periods of time. This led them to develop a completely separate system of time-keeping, the Long Count.
The Long Count is a base-20, or vigesimal number system, with one exception. As with our own base-10 number system, there’s likely a simple explanation for this. We have five fingers on each hand, and two hands — we chose to count using our fingers, while the Maya used fingers and toes.
The base unit of the Long Count is a day, called a kin. Twenty kin is a uinal (or winal), 18 uinal is a tun, 20 tun is a k’atun and 20 k’atun is a b’ak’tun. The odd 18 count is likely to bring a tun closer to a solar year — one tun is 360 days, rather than the 400 it would be if counting by 20.
The Maya wrote Long Count dates from left to right, beginning with the largest number. For example, Dec. 21 is written as 13.0.8.2.2, or 13 b’ak’tun, 0 k’atun, 8 tun, 2 uinal and 2 kin. That count also allows us to trace back to the exact year the Maya believe our current world began on: 3114 B.C., about 600 years before the Pyramids of Giza were built.
The Maya made a habit of writing the date, as measured by the Long Count, on many of their inscriptions. For this reason, archaeologists can tell exactly when significant events happened in the Maya world. For example, we know the powerful city of Tikal was conquered by an alliance of the rival cities Caracol and Calakmul in A.D. 562. Tikal would prove victorious over the nearby city of Dos Pilas in the next century, in 672, only to be defeated five years later by La Corona, an ally of Calakmul. The coronations of new kings, as well as the end of k’atuns and other auspicious dates, were also recorded on stela.
The Maya sometimes noted dates in terms of their distance from another date. Some calculations using this form of notation appear to have been used to refer to events extraordinarily far back in the past. One date corresponds to an event some 90 million years before A.D. 761, another stretches back even further, to 400 million years.
Finds like these, writes archaeologist Clive Ruggles, reveal the broader significance of the Maya’s use of calendars. Creating such lengthy blocks of time, he says, allowed the Maya to conceive of history on a grand scale.
More information: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-the-maya-created-their-extraordinarily-accurate-calendar-thousands-of
https://www.thoughtco.com/ancient-maya-astronomy-2136314
https://ancientmayalife.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-moon-and-ancient-maya.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/xultun-mayan-calendar/
https://inf.news/en/science/3c1f82703a781f3e2013d62c3e5a9fe4.html
