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Building Cultural Knowledge the Example of the Mesoamerican

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Building Cultural Knowledge the Example of the Mesoamerican Oceans of Truth San Francisco University High School 1­20 1.3 “Long Learning” ­ Building Cultural Knowledge The Example of the Mesoamerican Calendar Human beings settled in the Americas about 20,000 years ago, after traveling from Asia across a northern “land bridge” that connected to what is now Alaska. There is evidence of agricultural settlements in Mesoamerica since about 1500 BCE. Many different cultures and civilizations arose in the region, but the Mayans in particular stand out for their written language and advanced form of calendar. The Mayan calendar is unique in its complexity and sophistication. It is actually a combination of two types of calendars, each of which is its own system of interlocking cycles. The calendar round provides a way to ​ ​ specify unique dates over a 52 year period. This is useful for chronicling and describing events on the scale of a human life. The long count is a calendar with a much longer time scale; it was created to be able to ​ ​ reference dates at any point in a great age, a period of over 5000 years. The Mayans saw time as cyclical, and ​ ​ that at the close of one great age, the world would be destroyed and re-created, and the calendar would reset and begin again. The calendar round is built from three different cycles. The Mayan number system is a base-20 system, ​ ​ meaning that there are 20 different digits. It is no surprise, then, that the first cycle is 20 days long, with a particular glyph (a character in the Mayan written language) associated with each day (see Table 1.1 below). There is also a second cycle of 13 days, and each day is assigned a number in sequence. This means that each day the calendar date advances by one glyph of the 20 day cycle and one number of the 13 day cycle; a date is specified using both the glyph and the number. This pair of interlocked cycles will produce 260 unique dates before it starts to repeat itself. This 260-day cycle is known as the tzolkin, and it was in widespread use ​ ​ throughout Mesoamerica starting around 500 BCE. It is interesting that doesn’t appear to be tied to the seasons, or any astronomical cycle. Table 1.1 The 20 day cycle of the tzolkin. Two forms of each glyph are shown, one for inscriptions (left) and one for written text ​ ​ (right)20 1. 6. 11. 16. Imix Cimi Chuen Cib 2. 7. 12. 17. Ik Manik Eb Caban 3. 8. 13. 18. Akbal Lamat Ben Etznab 4. 9. 14. 19. Kan Muluc Ix Cauac 5. 10. 15. 20. Chicchan Oc Men Ahau 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzolk%27in ​ Oceans of Truth San Francisco University High School 1­21 Figure 1.21 Mayan numerals. The numbers 1 through 13 were used to count the days of the 13-day cycle of the Tzolkin21 The Mayans combined the tzolkin with another cycle, the haab, which is similar to the ancient Egyptian year ​ ​ of 365 days. The haab consisted of 18 uinals of 20 days apiece, totalling 360 days, plus 5 extra days that ​ ​ weren’t part of an uinal. When the haab is combined with the tzolkin, it takes three pieces of information to specify the date: the haab date and the 20-day glyph and 13-day number of the tzolkin date. This results in 18,980 unique combinations, which takes about 52 tropical years to complete. See Figure 1.22 below for a mechanical representation of this combination of cycles. Figure 1.22 Diagram of the interlocking cycles of the Mayan calendar round. The innermost gear is the 13-day cycle. That ring ​ and the 20-day ring that encompasses it make up the tzolkin, which takes 260 days to run through all combinations of day names. The tzolkin is also connected to the haab, only a portion of which is shown, which has 365 days in its cycle. Each of the three gears advances one day at a time, resulting in a 18,980 unique combinations of day names to form the date in the red box. It takes about 52 years for this cycle to repeat.22 21 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maya.png 22 Adapted from ​ http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/library/library-exhibitions/the-ancient-future-mesoamerican-and-andean-timekeeping/ maya Oceans of Truth San Francisco University High School 1­22 The long count date is structured in a way that might seem more familiar to us, as it is conceptually similar to ​ ​ our modern Gregorian calendar but with more layers of units. Just as we combine days into months and months into years, the long count combines units of time into units of longer time spans. In the long count, 20 days form a uinal, 18 uinal form a tun, 20 tun form a katun, and 20 katun form a baktun. Table 1.2 Units of Time ​ Gregorian Calendar Units Mayan Long Count Units 1 month = 28-31 days 1 uinal = 20 days 1 year = 12 months ⋍ 365 days 1 tun = 18 uinal = 360 days 1 century = 100 years ⋍ 36,500 days 1 katun = 20 tun = 7200 days 1 millenium = 10 centuries ⋍ 365,000 days 1 baktun = 20 katun = 144,000 days 1 great age = 13 baktun = 1,872,000 days There are several things that make the Mayan calendar remarkable. One is that it is based on cycles that have no connection to the tropical year, lunar phases, or even the motions of the planets. The cycle lengths of 13, 18, and 20 seem to be numerically significance, as they show up in a variety of places, but we don’t know what they relate to in Mayan culture. This very elaborate and complex calendar was not an attempt to predict seasonal changes or celestial phenomena, as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian calendars were. It is also very interesting that while the calendar round seemed designed to measure time on a human scale, the long count was designed to measure time on a truly cosmic scale. What was the worldview that made it important to measure such vast expanses of time? It is important to note that although the calendar system had no apparent relationship to astronomical phenomena, the Mayans were clearly sophisticated and accomplished astronomers. The peak of Mayan civilization occurred around 800 CE, and built into the impressive cities of that time are careful alignments of buildings with celestial directions. There are many examples of temples with architectural features aligned with the rising and setting points of the Sun at important moments of the year, including the famous El Castillo pyramid at Chichen Itza, in the Yucatan. At sunrise on the day of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the edge of the pyramid casts a serpent-like shadow on the side of its staircase, seemingly connected to the large snake head at the base of the pyramid. As the Sun rises, the shadow wriggles down the length of the staircase, evoking an animated image of the feathered serpent god, Kukulkan. ​ ​ Figure 1.23 The “El Castillo” pyramid at ​ Chichen Itza, as seen at sunrise on the day of the vernal equinox. The edge of the pyramid casts an undulating shadow that looks like the body of the feathered serpent god whose head is at the bottom of the staircase.23 23 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/ChichenItzaEquinox.jpg Oceans of Truth San Francisco University High School 1­23 Also at Chichen Itza is a building named “El Caracol” (the snail) because of the peculiar round shape of its upper structure. Built into the round structure are a series of windows that provide sight-lines to the horizon that align with important rising and setting points of the Sun. There are also windows that are aligned with the rising and setting points of the planet Venus, a planet whose motions were studied and catalogued carefully in the few surviving Mayan texts.. Figure 1.24 a “El Caracol”at Chichen Itza. The upper structure of the building is round, which is unusual in Mayan ​ architecture, and appears to be designed as a sort of observatory.24 Figure 1.24b The lower part of the round structure was Figure 1.24c The smaller, top part of the round structure ​ ​ built with important solar alignments. 25 has sighting windows aligned with the extreme rising and ​ setting points of the planet Venus. 26 ​ 24 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Chichen_Itza_4.jpg 25 http://www.exploratorium.edu/ancientobs/chichen/HTML/caracol.html ​ 26 ibid Oceans of Truth San Francisco University High School 1­24 We can deduce a great deal from the architectural alignments still discernable in the ruins of the great Mayan cities, but the Mayans also had a sophisticated written language which they used for inscriptions on buildings and for extensive records in the form of books. The most complete surviving Mayan book is known as the Dresden Codex, so named because it is part of the collection of a museum in Dresden, Germany. It consists of ​ 40 pages made from the flattened bark of a fig tree and assembled edge to edge, accordion style. Only about seventy percent of the text has been successfully translated so far, but what can be read is a set of highly accurate astronomical tables, almanacs, and instructions for important rituals. One page of it is reproduced in Figure 1.25 (on the following page); it is a list of the dates of solar eclipses and a description of the omens associated with them.
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