How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries
22 comments
·October 27, 2025photon_garden
tdeck
The Maya are still around, but the Maya civilization's institutions were all destroyed. And the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books [1] they could find and burning them. So a lot of knowledge was lost.
Cantinflas
The link doesn't mention "seeking out" those books, in fact it mentions catholic priests both burning and lamenting the burn.
jacobolus
They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also some remaining fragments of a few others. One Spaniard wrote about it:
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
wudangmonk
I guess that is implied since these things always happen this way, its not like book burners are just having a nice campfire and the books they dislike just happen to be close by.
throwup238
I was surprised to find out that there are still many indigenous groups with populations in the millions. My California public education made it seem like they were all pretty much wiped out save for those who survived to the various reservation systems.
My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.
jcranmer
Even in the US, the Indian Wars weren't finished until the 1890s. In fact, most of the big wars against the Native Americans took place after the American Civil War. One of the big faults I have with US history in the education system is that it tends to front-load the depiction of Native Americans in the Precolonial portion of history, with an echo in the Trail of Tears and forced migration in the 1830s, and largely edits them out of the history of the settling of the west, despite this process requiring a very violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants.
tdeck
This is also a difference in outcomes between traditional colonialism (where indigenous people were viewed as a source of labor) and settler colonialism (where indigenous people are viewed simply as "in the way"). That's not to say that traditional colonialism is in any way acceptable, however.
gausswho
The Mapuche even expanded their territorial control, in large part to their acquisition and mastery of Spanish horses.
WalterBright
The Commanche also held out until after the Civil War.
beerandt
Was always weird to me how "the French and Indian War" had Indian involvement almost over emphasized to pretend like it wasn't the extension of a European war...
While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.
One of my first realizations of slant put on history.
bboygravity
I've been in towns in Mexico where the kids ONLY speak a Mayan language. No Spanish or English.
I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.
NooneAtAll3
How does one even come up with 260 day year?
Is the weather in the tropics so similar that year-on-year mismatch stops mattering?
antognini
The origins of the 260 day ritual year are not known for certain, but there are a couple of hypotheses:
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
ranger_danger
The sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
pavinjoseph
The original RDB!
uvaursi
Whenever I see these backwards-applied math models I think of the “wet streets cause rain” expression.
> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations
The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.
(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)