Maya artefacts are something you'd probably expect to find in an archaeological site in Mexico or hidden in ruins buried deep in the Central American jungle. A startling number of them turn up in Europe, however – a legacy of the pillaging carried out by Spanish Conquistadors during the early 16th century.
In 1744, one such artefact found its way to Germany, and was catalogued into a collection in Dresden’s Royal Library. It remains there to this day.
The artefact is believed to be almost 1,000 years old and, in a sense, a library is the most logical place for it. That’s because, to all intents and purposes, it’s a book. One of the oldest surviving books from the Americas.
Its age and provenance, while profound, aren’t what make it amazing, though.
What makes it amazing is that parts of the book contain remarkably detailed observations of astronomical phenomena. So detailed, in fact, that it could have been used to predict eclipses across the entire globe.
The book has become known as the Dresden Codex. And as scientists gradually decode the information held within its pages, they’re unlocking the secrets of the Maya civilisation.
Accurate predictions
The Dresden Codex isn’t like a book in the modern sense, with covers and pages bound together along one edge. It’s more like an accordion, with pages arranged next to each other, but capable of being folded back on themselves so that the page you want is at the top.
Some of the pages are damaged, and many that remain are concerned with ritual and ceremony.
Codices, like the Dresden Codex, were essentially instruction pamphlets and would have been used “as a tool for ritual, rather than narrative,” Dr Justin Lowry, an archaeologist at New York State University, who has studied the Codex, explains.
But among the hieroglyphs, notes and images on the pages of the Dresden Codex are details of astronomical observations in the form of an eclipse table, and it’s this that has become the most famous.
Why? Because, according to a recently published paper by Lowry and Prof John Justeson, also of New York State University, the information in those tables predicts solar and lunar eclipses with even more accuracy and detail than previously believed.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that this eclipse table doesn’t quite work like a calendar, setting out a cadence of repeating astronomical events over a period of time.
The table is more of a ‘work in progress’, updated from earlier versions to document the adjustments and corrections to its predictions as more observations were gradually incorporated.
“This isn’t a system of prediction that was invented [entirely in one go],” Lowry says. “This is a system that was maintained over thousands of years.”
Empirical data
Lunar eclipses occur roughly every 173 days and so, if you predict eclipses at intervals of six lunar months, or roughly every 177 days, those predictions will become increasingly incorrect as time passes.
As such, there’s a need for correction and adjustment, which is what the eclipse table is for – it links the pattern of eclipses to the lunar months. In the Codex, there’s an irregular pattern of five- and six-month intervals.
“What we’re seeing is that they’re adjusting in a way that can’t be predicted by numerical prediction. It has to have been empirical,” Lowry says.
Each adjustment added to the table’s accuracy, meaning that it could be continually used for predictions over hundreds of years. So much so, in fact, that the table wasn’t just accurate for eclipses in South America, but elsewhere too – even though that wasn’t its intended purpose.
“Their tables worked worldwide,” Justeson says. “The Maya didn’t know it, but they predicted eclipses all over the world. And they were correct.”
The lunar eclipses aren’t the only astronomical phenomena catalogued in the Codex, however. There are also tables for the positions of Venus and Mars, and other tables have information about solar eclipses, too.
All of which is a testament to the Mayas’ remarkable abilities, not only with mathematics (to work out the timings of these astronomical phenomena), but also their observational abilities to see and record them.
Because, as far as we know, the Maya had nothing like the telescopes we have today – they did all of this with the naked eye.
Updated records
The eclipse table in the Dresden Codex is believed to be a revision of earlier tables, as it includes what are thought to be copy errors and indicators that new information had to be squeezed into the limited space.
Although we don’t know exactly how many revisions the table had gone through, these corrections point to just how long the Maya had been practising astronomy.
“What we do know is that the Maya were keeping a record,” Lowry says. “And that record is an empirical record of observation over a very long time… The suggestion is that they were doing this as early as 150 AD, if not earlier.”
This extraordinary display of dedication to record-keeping and astronomical data is often taken as an indication of a society-wide dedication to science and scientific methodology. And indeed, astronomy wasn’t the only field in which the Maya demonstrated advanced abilities.
They also had sophisticated engineering and architectural abilities (they may not have had telescopes, but they did have structures that served as observatories, some of which still stand today; known as E Groups, they were complexes of buildings positioned and aligned in such a way as to correspond to equinoxes and solstices).
From studies on the paints and pigments they used in their building, we can see they understood biochemical processes, and they also domesticated a variety of plants, which shows an understanding of selective breeding.
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Science and religion
It’s important to note, however, that all of the information within the Dresden Codex is deeply intertwined with spiritual and ritual significance.
For the Maya, astronomy wasn’t a form of knowledge opposed to a religious or spiritual philosophy, but part and parcel of the same.
So, should we view the Maya as a society of scientists? That depends on how you interpret the motivations for their empirical work.
“I’m not resistant to calling them scientists, because they were doing science. Maintaining an improved prediction of eclipses is science,” Lowry says. “But it’s always integrated into ritual.”
He describes the Dresden Codex as a religious text, with references on every page to gods or rituals. Still, there’s a clear emphasis on accurately modelling the world around them: “I would say that they were rationalists.”
Other researchers point out that much of the research done on Maya culture tends to assume astronomy had primacy because it’s most recognisable to us in a modern Western context.
When researchers first began to study the Dresden Codex and other materials like it, they focused on understanding the eclipse table and systems of counting because numbers and patterns were more easily recognisable than their complex language, which uses hieroglyphs.
This led many to assume that a thirst for astronomical knowledge was a driving motivation in Maya culture.
There’s another way to interpret this dedication, though. Perhaps the elaborate eclipse table and calendars weren’t intended for prediction. Instead of looking forward, they may actually have been looking back.
Certain periods of Maya culture had a strong interest in history, and the astronomical calendars could have been just as much about working out dates and eclipse cycles for past events as for predicting future ones.
“We don’t know that they were trying to predict. We don’t even know that they were trying to record specific events,” says Prof Gerardo Aldana, a historian of science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“There’s a possibility that if they’re looking at mythological events and incorporating patterns that they see, like astronomical phenomena, they could be reconstructing [past events].
"In other words, they would be doing something more like what Johannes Kepler did when he recalculated when the birth of Christ would have been, based on astronomical events. In that case, [the eclipse table] wouldn’t be intended to be predictive.”
That might seem like an odd reason to keep records of eclipse events to us today, but it makes sense when considered within the Maya focus on genealogy.
It could be a way of rediscovering the past, and tying the births and life events of past figures to the astronomical calendar – just like Kepler did in Europe hundreds of years later.
The bigger picture
We simply can’t know what the motivations were for keeping this table, and we should be wary of making assumptions about what science is, and how it’s practised, in cultures other than our own.
That’s emphasised when we look at the Dresden Codex as a whole, rather than focusing on just the eclipse table. The text descriptions that go with the table reference mythological events, not the types of knowledge that we would think of as scientific.
So really, the question is less whether these eclipse observations are for science, and more about what activities we count as being scientifically motivated. That requires a much broader understanding of Maya culture, including politics, religion and technology of the time.
We only have limited knowledge of the Mayas’ approach to these fields, especially considering how few written texts remain from this period. But the fact that only certain types of knowledge were written down doesn’t mean that they were the only ones considered important or fundamental.
The codices in general contain information that would have been difficult to remember or convey in other ways, such as orally, but they don’t contain other types of writing, such as poetry or stories.
What’s more, the Dresden Codex was written by a small handful of people, who can hardly be representative of Maya society as a whole.
What we do know, however, is that among that society was a group of people called daykeepers, whose job it was to maintain calendars for ritual purposes. That this was a career and something that was continued over thousands of years shows how central it was to Maya culture.
A practical motivation
It’s often said that the Maya had a particular attachment to the concepts of time and recurring events. Philosophically, the Dresden Codex’s eclipse table sits comfortably within that context. But arguably their primary motivation was something much more practical: agriculture.
The skills needed to select and grow crops on a sufficient scale to feed a large population were enormous and very much tied to the ability to track the passage of time.
“Understanding time through the sky was part of Maya culture across the board,” Lowry says. “It might relate to them being fundamentally agriculturalists, who are geared into empirical observations to try and track seasons.”
The Maya’s astronomical observations, some of which were recorded in the Dresden Codex, were useful as a kind of timekeeping.
As such, accuracy and prediction would still be very important, even if it stemmed less from an abstract interest in the stars and more from a practical need to work with seasons and crop growth.
“What I’ve come to believe and understand is going on in Mesoamerica is that astronomy was very tangential and secondary,” Aldana says.
“What was primary – what formed the core of their scientific interests – was agriculture, botany, plants and their connection to medicine.”
We tend to think of the Maya as uniquely scientifically minded among ancient cultures, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
Other ancient Mesoamerican cultures also had a strong focus on record keeping, as well as significant contact and shared knowledge with the Maya.
The Maya loom large in popular imagination because they had both a large geographical presence and a very long-lived society. But they weren’t necessarily unusual in their interests.
“I do think the Maya are unique in the sense of being uniquely Maya. But they’re also very human in the sense of wanting to understand the world around them,” Lowry says. “We all want an answer to the question, ‘What are we doing here?’”
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