Maya Inscriptions Name Astronomer-Mathematician and Record Planetary Orbit Calculations

Researchers have identified an ancient Maya astronomer-mathematician by name along with his calculations predicting the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus, New Scientist reported. The inscriptions appear on the wall of a small masonry building at Xultun, Guatemala, and date to around 1200 years ago.

The mural, labeled Text 19, contains 11 hieroglyphs that include the name Sak Tahn Waax, translated as White-chested Fox.

Franco Rossi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the text represents the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name. It is also the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician known from anywhere in the Americas, he said.

Excavations at Xultun since 2010 uncovered around 50 similar texts on the east and north-east walls, which researchers view as rough drafts charting celestial cycles.

Text 19 uses time periods from a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar made of 19 months, a 584-day approximation of Venus’s synodic cycle and a 780-day approximation of Mars’s synodic cycle. The formula spans five Venus synodic cycles, or 2920 days, and most likely refers to 7 November of AD 781 in the Julian calendar.

Rossi and colleagues scanned, photographed and magnified the hieroglyphs under varied lighting before comparing them to later astronomical-mathematical writings.

“Whether this is an instance of the scribe himself signing his own calculation or attributing the intellectual work to another, we have a formula and the name of its creator,” Rossi said. The Maya civilisation flourished in Central America between roughly 2000 BC and AD 1697. 2026.10378.