The famous Mayan calendar was designed so that it could even predict eclipses (and remained accurate for centuries). According to scientists fromUniversity at Albany (USA), the method could also have “guessed” modern-day phenomena.
Could the Mayans really predict solar and lunar eclipses?
Like other advanced ancient civilizations, i Maya they observed the sky in search of auspicious signs and divine punishments, and their calendar is very different from what we are used to, so its use has long been a mystery to modern archaeologists. In fact, it had 260 days and was used to predict the fate of individuals.
Some important information about its “mechanism” has been deduced from the Dresden Codex, a manuscript dating back to the 13th or 14th century containing detailed astronomical information, including precise calculations of the Venus cycle, which miraculously survived the Spanish conquest of the New World.
In the precious document there is a table with 405 new Moons, which correspond almost exactly to 46 of these 260-day cycles: the Maya, therefore, could predict the occurrence of the full Moon or the new Moon with an accuracy of one day.
What are eclipses and why they could be deduced from the Mayan calendar
The lunar eclipse is a suggestive natural phenomenon that occurs when the shadow of the Earth, illuminated by the Sun, completely or partially obscures our satellite, at the moment in which the latter is in the “full” phase while the Sun, Earth and it are aligned in this order.
The solar eclipse however, perhaps even more spectacular, occurs when the Sun, Moon and Earth are perfectly aligned in this other order. In both cases, if the alignment is not perfect, the phenomenon is partial.
In the Mayan table there were two points that approached the exact alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun. The 260-day calendar therefore not only allowed the prediction of lunar phases, but also of eclipses that could occur anywhere in the world. Among other things, while lunar eclipses can be observed by a record number of people at the same time, solar eclipses sometimes occur in places where only a few people can see them (this is due to the enormous difference in size between the “disks” of the stars and therefore of the projected shadow cones).
In reality, if one were to consider the lunar calendar table as it is, its ability to predict eclipses would get worse and worse after a few cycles because there is always a small margin of “shift”. But the Maya had thought of this too, and learned to reset the lunar calendar table at specific intervals.
This article has provided evidence of developments in lunar theory among Mayan calendar specialists since around 350 AD – the authors write – It focuses on the methods they used to predict the dates when solar eclipses might occur in their territories, as reported in an eclipse table in the Dresden Codex, which most likely included the possible dates of eclipses during a 32-year period and ¾ starting from 1083 or 1116 AD
If this last hypothesis were confirmed, among other things, it would confirm that the Maya could have predicted all the eclipses to date, including the two that crossed Mexico in recent years.
The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
