Newly found Mayan records of astronomical phenomena in Dresden Codex

Serbian Astronomical Journal

article

Böhm B.  Vondrák J.¹  Böhm V.² 

[1] Emeritus, Astronomical Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences;The University for Political and Social Sciences

关键词: Ephemerides;    Planets and satellites: individual: Mercury;    Venus;    Mars;    Jupiter;    Saturn;    History and philosophy of astronomy;   

DOI  :  10.2298/SAJ2306029V

来源: Astronomical Observatory, Department of Astronomy, Belgrade

【 摘 要 】

The rich culture of old Maya gave birth to a very complicated and complex calendar;they also recorded important historical events and many significant astronomical phenomena. Themain source of information is represented by Dresden Codex (DC), one of the four preserved Mayanhieroglyphic literal legacies. DC roughly covers the interval between 280 and 1325 AD. The old problemof precise Mayan dating with respect to our calendar is traditionally called correlation; it expresses thedifference in days between the Long Count of the Mayan calendar and the Julian Date, used in presentday astronomy. There exist more than fifty published correlations that differ one from the other by asmuch as several centuries. Historians mostly accept the so called Goodman-Mart´ınez-Thompson (GMT)value of 584 283 days, which is based mostly on historical events extracted from the sources of a postclassical period of Mayan history. On the contrary, brothers B¨ohm used precisely dated astronomicaldata from classical period to derive the B¨ohm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days. Unlike the GMTcorrelation it is in excellent agreement with the astronomical phenomena recorded in DC. Since thenwe published several papers supporting the validity of BB correlation and its advantage over GMT inthe classical period of Mayan history. To this end, we used more records of astronomical phenomenadiscovered in DC. This study describes six records of planetary conjunctions that we found recentlyon p. 37 of DC that concern planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of these recordscoincide with the real occurrences of these phenomena within several days, if BB correlation is applied.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC-ND