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Inscription at Xultun Names Maya Astronomer-Mathematician Sak Tahn Waax
Researchers deciphered Text 19, an 11-hieroglyph inscription at the Maya site of Xultun in Guatemala, identifying Sak Tahn Waax and his calculations for Mars and Venus cycles around AD 781. The find provides the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician from the Americas.
Jul 16, 3:42 PM·1m read1 source
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An inscription at the Maya site of Xultun in Guatemala names an ancient astronomer-mathematician called Sak Tahn Waax and records his calculations of the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus made around 1200 years ago. @NewScientist reported that the text, known as Text 19, consists of 11 hieroglyphs located on the east and north-east walls of a small masonry building.
Franco Rossi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues deciphered the inscription after scanning, photographing and comparing it with other Maya writings.
The calculations draw on a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day approximation of Venus’s synodic cycle and a 780-day approximation of Mars’s synodic cycle. The formula spans five Venus cycles for a total of 2920 days and most likely refers to 7 November AD 781 in the Julian calendar.
Sak Tahn Waax, whose name translates to White-chested Fox, is the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician known from anywhere in the Americas, Rossi said.
“This is the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name,” he said. Excavations at Xultun began in 2010 and have uncovered around 50 similar texts believed to be rough drafts by Maya mathematicians charting celestial cycles. The Maya civilization flourished in Central America between roughly 2000 BC and AD 1697.
Rossi said the formula shows the relationship between the planets and human counts of time in ways that could apply to political ceremony and predictive astronomy. The study appears in the journal Antiquity.
