4 ms·

Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries

85 points by rguiscard 11mo ago

yubblegum 11mo ago
Complete clickbait. There is not even a transitory appearance of a "how". tldr; table is rebuilt at some point prior to the great cycle's end. How the table is built and just how did the Maya make the calculations? Crickets.
- bradrn 11mo ago
  The actual paper seems to have more information: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt9039 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt9039
temperceve 11mo ago
1491 ... if you have never read it was very eye opening as to how badass all these civilizations were. Their loss today would be similar to as if we suddenly lost 99% of all China.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- hydrogen7800 11mo ago
  This book was real eye-opening for me. I heard about it when it was first released, but sort of dismissed it since on its face it seemed like just another pop alt-history, "you won't learn this in school" book. But it is well researched, and well regarded by historians[0]. [0] One example:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006.tb00265.x https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006...
- tokai 11mo ago
  1491 is pretty late. Both Babylonians and the Chinese predicted solar eclipses several thousand years before this.
  - NoNotTheDuo 11mo ago
    OP was referring to the book titled 1491: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-...
- retrac 11mo ago
  The evidence is being expanded over time. And it feels like the scale on every dimension is always being revised upward. For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region. There are a handful of fragmentary inscriptions - only three or four from two or three sites - in a script that isn't Maya [0]. It has a similar logogram + syllable structure to Maya. Stylistically it has the whole glowering angry sideways faces thing going on too. It is obviously culturally related. No one can confidently decode it, at least partly due to the limited fragmentary nature of the corpus. But if you read it like it phonetically were Maya based on the subset of common glyphs -- it does seem a lot like it might be a Mixe-Zoque language. Or more accurately, something distantly related to the ancestor of the modern Mixe-Zoque languages. While no one can read the text, one of the fragments has a date in the same long count calendar the Maya used which we can read: 7.16.6.16.18 -- September 1 32 BC. This aligns well with the context in which it was found, about 2000 years old. There are yet another set of these head symbol glyphs associated with yet another site (Teotihuacan [1]) and yet another extinct culture (the area had long been controlled by the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived). It seems to be the writing system of another people who were prominent and ruled a large area from Teotihuacan at their peak around perhaps 100 - 500 AD. The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec. But it may be a distant relative of the ancestor of Nahuatl. There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2] There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script. Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after. We're now as far back as 1500 BC or so. The scope and span! At least three different writing systems. Related. But associated with probably three different spoken language families. And this is over a span of two thousand or more years. Different cultures formed literate empires and city-building civilizations which lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, rising and falling, repeatedly. The Long Count calendar is sophisticated and reckons an exact count of days from its epoch (generally agreed [4] to be August 11, 3114 BC). It was used regularly for some thousand or more years. It was possibly used by more than one culture / language group at the same time (Maya and whoever made the Isthmian inscriptions). The use of the Long Count is internally consistent: the astronomical observations and archaeological dating by other means generally all is in accord. Only people of the modern era have been so precise and consistent in their time keeping. And not as for long yet. Getting a bit looser with it: I get an ever-growing feeling that the Mesoamerican civilizations had an intense sense of history and understanding of their own place in time from very early on. Aside from just finding many more texts, the Holy Grail today would be to discover a bilingual text. Even a tiny fragment would, if nothing else, further confirm the depth of the cultural world that once existed. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscription.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscriptio... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuacan-writing-mystery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuaca... [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar#Correlations_between_Western_calendars_and_the_Long_Count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...
- guestbest 11mo ago
  Did China perform daily mass human sacrifice, too?
  - retrac 11mo ago
    I'm not sure about daily. But yes, human sacrifice was practiced in predynastic China. At least one polity in the late Shang (c. 2000 BC) seems to have staged enormous mass executions as public spectacles. One of the questions sometimes posed to the ancestors on the Oracle Bone inscriptions (the earliest known form of Chinese writing) are questions like: is today an auspicious day to sacrifice the prisoners? > A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice (see figure 2 above).These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. “burial sacrifice”) refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to “volunteer” themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. “human offering sacrifice) is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony. The demographic pattern of Shang sacrificial victims is also quite interesting. Xunzang victims (or “volunteers”) were mostly personal slaves (i.e. house servants), and therefore in xunzang burial sites we could find a pretty even mix of male and female human remains. Renji victims, on the other hand, appears to be predominately male. [0] [0] https://sites.psu.edu/kerenw/?p=102 https://sites.psu.edu/kerenw/?p=102
skeezyjefferson 11mo ago
isnt it more embarrasing that they believed the sun needed help to reappear? that they mistook the feelings in their head to be real, kind of how people think they can feel or talk to a god? we love to pat ourselves on the back but never take a look at how stupid we actually are, most people most of the time. i feel regularly embarrassed at the mistakes we make
- ainiriand 11mo ago
  That attitude towards this issue, while natural, brings nothing positive to you. You should try to embrace our limitations, use them to play in your favor if needed, and be amazed at the diversity and curiosity of human thought. We will conquer the darkness, bit by bit.
  - llamasushi 11mo ago
    That's an optimistic take, but equally valid is the take where delusions provide impetus for some pretty nasty behaviour - eg see the crusades
    - barbazoo 11mo ago
      I had to broaden my view here recently a little bit myself. Worshipping deities has been around for a long time (8000 years?) and mostly involved no crusades, they certainly aren’t universal.
      - skeezyjefferson 11mo ago
        [dead]
- iterance 11mo ago
  We have horoscopes and quantum computing. The existence of one is no shame on the other.
- culi 11mo ago
  Many of these indigenous knowledge systems are essentially memory palaces. It's a way to memorize large amounts of information and map that information on some sort of tangible metaphor. Modern western astrology is pretty divorced from the original practice(s), but the original practice actually used a sidereal clock and actually corresponded to the positions of stars. The stars being an important component for navigation, agricultural calendars, etc. Astrology served as a memory palace to store this sort of information. These metaphors are quite common across the world and over time gain many layers of knowledge. Go a little more east and you'll commonly see the 4 winds, the 4 cardinal directions, the 4 tastes, 4 [insert characteristics of medicinal properties] etc all mapped onto each other. The most embarrassing part of humanity imo is the arrogance and disregard with which people sometimes approach other cultures
palmotea 11mo ago
> Scientists Reveal How The Maya Predicted Eclipses For Centuries It sounds like scientists actually revealed how to read a table of predictions in a document: > Juteson and Lowry reject the long-standing assumption that the table was reset at its final position (that is, that it was intended to be used on a continuous loop, returning to month 1 after reaching month 405). > The trouble is, using the table in this way doesn't actually work. > ...Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.
utkarsh858 11mo ago
This reminds me of something. In Indian society, households have this calender called panchang. It is released annually by a group of priests who read and decipher ancient scriptures known as Vedas. Surprisingly panchang is quite accurate and informative about duration of solar and lunar eclipses.
- srean 11mo ago
  Nope they are not accurate anymore, have not been for a while. They used to be though. The model is similar to the Ptolemaic model but independently derived. If anyone cases the model is described in suryasiddhnta, English translations freely available. The lack of accuracy of panchang is the result of accumulating calendric errors over centuries. Traditionally these used to get corrected by astronomical observations. However after the fall of Ujjain observatory the traditional / religious calendar has not been updated/corrected for centuries. In fact right after independence India's first prime minister set up a calendar reform committee to update and modernise the traditional calendar. Top Indian scientists as well as scholars of Vedic scriptures were part of the committee. To this day India government publishes these and updated positional astronomy records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_national_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_national_calendar
a_state_full 11mo ago
[dead]
hdevarajan 11mo ago
“Unfortunately, much of this knowledge – and the texts that contained it – was destroyed during the Spanish Inquisition, leaving only a few bits and pieces from which to reconstruct these advanced methods for celestial prediction.“ Not the Inquisition, which happened on a different continent!
- makeitdouble 11mo ago
  It's the shorter name of the agency, which indeed also operated in America > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition > The inquisition expanded to other domains under the Spanish Crown, including Southern Italy and the Americas, while also targeting those accused of alumbradismo, Protestantism, witchcraft, blasphemy, bigamy, sodomy, Freemasonry, etc.

85 points by rguiscard 11mo ago

Complete clickbait. There is not even a transitory appearance of a "how". tldr; table is rebuilt at some point prior to the great cycle's end. How the table is built and just how did the Maya make the calculations? Crickets.

bradrn 11mo ago
The actual paper seems to have more information: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt9039 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt9039

temperceve 11mo ago

1491 ... if you have never read it was very eye opening as to how badass all these civilizations were. Their loss today would be similar to as if we suddenly lost 99% of all China.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
hydrogen7800 11mo ago
This book was real eye-opening for me. I heard about it when it was first released, but sort of dismissed it since on its face it seemed like just another pop alt-history, "you won't learn this in school" book. But it is well researched, and well regarded by historians[0]. [0] One example:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006.tb00265.x https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006...
tokai 11mo ago
1491 is pretty late. Both Babylonians and the Chinese predicted solar eclipses several thousand years before this.
- NoNotTheDuo 11mo ago
  OP was referring to the book titled 1491: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-...
retrac 11mo ago
The evidence is being expanded over time. And it feels like the scale on every dimension is always being revised upward. For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region. There are a handful of fragmentary inscriptions - only three or four from two or three sites - in a script that isn't Maya [0]. It has a similar logogram + syllable structure to Maya. Stylistically it has the whole glowering angry sideways faces thing going on too. It is obviously culturally related. No one can confidently decode it, at least partly due to the limited fragmentary nature of the corpus. But if you read it like it phonetically were Maya based on the subset of common glyphs -- it does seem a lot like it might be a Mixe-Zoque language. Or more accurately, something distantly related to the ancestor of the modern Mixe-Zoque languages. While no one can read the text, one of the fragments has a date in the same long count calendar the Maya used which we can read: 7.16.6.16.18 -- September 1 32 BC. This aligns well with the context in which it was found, about 2000 years old. There are yet another set of these head symbol glyphs associated with yet another site (Teotihuacan [1]) and yet another extinct culture (the area had long been controlled by the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived). It seems to be the writing system of another people who were prominent and ruled a large area from Teotihuacan at their peak around perhaps 100 - 500 AD. The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec. But it may be a distant relative of the ancestor of Nahuatl. There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2] There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script. Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after. We're now as far back as 1500 BC or so. The scope and span! At least three different writing systems. Related. But associated with probably three different spoken language families. And this is over a span of two thousand or more years. Different cultures formed literate empires and city-building civilizations which lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, rising and falling, repeatedly. The Long Count calendar is sophisticated and reckons an exact count of days from its epoch (generally agreed [4] to be August 11, 3114 BC). It was used regularly for some thousand or more years. It was possibly used by more than one culture / language group at the same time (Maya and whoever made the Isthmian inscriptions). The use of the Long Count is internally consistent: the astronomical observations and archaeological dating by other means generally all is in accord. Only people of the modern era have been so precise and consistent in their time keeping. And not as for long yet. Getting a bit looser with it: I get an ever-growing feeling that the Mesoamerican civilizations had an intense sense of history and understanding of their own place in time from very early on. Aside from just finding many more texts, the Holy Grail today would be to discover a bilingual text. Even a tiny fragment would, if nothing else, further confirm the depth of the cultural world that once existed. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscription.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscriptio... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuacan-writing-mystery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuaca... [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar#Correlations_between_Western_calendars_and_the_Long_Count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...
guestbest 11mo ago
Did China perform daily mass human sacrifice, too?
- retrac 11mo ago
  I'm not sure about daily. But yes, human sacrifice was practiced in predynastic China. At least one polity in the late Shang (c. 2000 BC) seems to have staged enormous mass executions as public spectacles. One of the questions sometimes posed to the ancestors on the Oracle Bone inscriptions (the earliest known form of Chinese writing) are questions like: is today an auspicious day to sacrifice the prisoners? > A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice (see figure 2 above).These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. “burial sacrifice”) refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to “volunteer” themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. “human offering sacrifice) is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony. The demographic pattern of Shang sacrificial victims is also quite interesting. Xunzang victims (or “volunteers”) were mostly personal slaves (i.e. house servants), and therefore in xunzang burial sites we could find a pretty even mix of male and female human remains. Renji victims, on the other hand, appears to be predominately male. [0] [0] https://sites.psu.edu/kerenw/?p=102 https://sites.psu.edu/kerenw/?p=102

skeezyjefferson 11mo ago

isnt it more embarrasing that they believed the sun needed help to reappear? that they mistook the feelings in their head to be real, kind of how people think they can feel or talk to a god? we love to pat ourselves on the back but never take a look at how stupid we actually are, most people most of the time. i feel regularly embarrassed at the mistakes we make

ainiriand 11mo ago
That attitude towards this issue, while natural, brings nothing positive to you. You should try to embrace our limitations, use them to play in your favor if needed, and be amazed at the diversity and curiosity of human thought. We will conquer the darkness, bit by bit.
- llamasushi 11mo ago
  That's an optimistic take, but equally valid is the take where delusions provide impetus for some pretty nasty behaviour - eg see the crusades
  - barbazoo 11mo ago
    I had to broaden my view here recently a little bit myself. Worshipping deities has been around for a long time (8000 years?) and mostly involved no crusades, they certainly aren’t universal.
    - skeezyjefferson 11mo ago
      [dead]
iterance 11mo ago
We have horoscopes and quantum computing. The existence of one is no shame on the other.
culi 11mo ago
Many of these indigenous knowledge systems are essentially memory palaces. It's a way to memorize large amounts of information and map that information on some sort of tangible metaphor. Modern western astrology is pretty divorced from the original practice(s), but the original practice actually used a sidereal clock and actually corresponded to the positions of stars. The stars being an important component for navigation, agricultural calendars, etc. Astrology served as a memory palace to store this sort of information. These metaphors are quite common across the world and over time gain many layers of knowledge. Go a little more east and you'll commonly see the 4 winds, the 4 cardinal directions, the 4 tastes, 4 [insert characteristics of medicinal properties] etc all mapped onto each other. The most embarrassing part of humanity imo is the arrogance and disregard with which people sometimes approach other cultures

palmotea 11mo ago

> Scientists Reveal How The Maya Predicted Eclipses For Centuries It sounds like scientists actually revealed how to read a table of predictions in a document: > Juteson and Lowry reject the long-standing assumption that the table was reset at its final position (that is, that it was intended to be used on a continuous loop, returning to month 1 after reaching month 405). > The trouble is, using the table in this way doesn't actually work. > ...Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.

utkarsh858 11mo ago

This reminds me of something. In Indian society, households have this calender called panchang. It is released annually by a group of priests who read and decipher ancient scriptures known as Vedas. Surprisingly panchang is quite accurate and informative about duration of solar and lunar eclipses.

srean 11mo ago
Nope they are not accurate anymore, have not been for a while. They used to be though. The model is similar to the Ptolemaic model but independently derived. If anyone cases the model is described in suryasiddhnta, English translations freely available. The lack of accuracy of panchang is the result of accumulating calendric errors over centuries. Traditionally these used to get corrected by astronomical observations. However after the fall of Ujjain observatory the traditional / religious calendar has not been updated/corrected for centuries. In fact right after independence India's first prime minister set up a calendar reform committee to update and modernise the traditional calendar. Top Indian scientists as well as scholars of Vedic scriptures were part of the committee. To this day India government publishes these and updated positional astronomy records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_national_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_national_calendar

a_state_full 11mo ago

[dead]

hdevarajan 11mo ago

“Unfortunately, much of this knowledge – and the texts that contained it – was destroyed during the Spanish Inquisition, leaving only a few bits and pieces from which to reconstruct these advanced methods for celestial prediction.“ Not the Inquisition, which happened on a different continent!

makeitdouble 11mo ago
It's the shorter name of the agency, which indeed also operated in America > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition > The inquisition expanded to other domains under the Spanish Crown, including Southern Italy and the Americas, while also targeting those accused of alumbradismo, Protestantism, witchcraft, blasphemy, bigamy, sodomy, Freemasonry, etc.