Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
[0] One example:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006...
For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region.
There are a handful of fragmentary inscriptions - only three or four from two or three sites - in a script that isn't Maya [0]. It has a similar logogram + syllable structure to Maya. Stylistically it has the whole glowering angry sideways faces thing going on too.
It is obviously culturally related. No one can confidently decode it, at least partly due to the limited fragmentary nature of the corpus. But if you read it like it phonetically were Maya based on the subset of common glyphs -- it does seem a lot like it might be a Mixe-Zoque language. Or more accurately, something distantly related to the ancestor of the modern Mixe-Zoque languages.
While no one can read the text, one of the fragments has a date in the same long count calendar the Maya used which we can read: 7.16.6.16.18 -- September 1 32 BC. This aligns well with the context in which it was found, about 2000 years old.
There are yet another set of these head symbol glyphs associated with yet another site (Teotihuacan [1]) and yet another extinct culture (the area had long been controlled by the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived). It seems to be the writing system of another people who were prominent and ruled a large area from Teotihuacan at their peak around perhaps 100 - 500 AD. The language it encodes is not the Nahuatl of the Aztec. But it may be a distant relative of the ancestor of Nahuatl. There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2]
There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script. Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after. We're now as far back as 1500 BC or so.
The scope and span! At least three different writing systems. Related. But associated with probably three different spoken language families. And this is over a span of two thousand or more years. Different cultures formed literate empires and city-building civilizations which lasted hundreds, even thousands of years, rising and falling, repeatedly.
The Long Count calendar is sophisticated and reckons an exact count of days from its epoch (generally agreed [4] to be August 11, 3114 BC). It was used regularly for some thousand or more years. It was possibly used by more than one culture / language group at the same time (Maya and whoever made the Isthmian inscriptions). The use of the Long Count is internally consistent: the astronomical observations and archaeological dating by other means generally all is in accord. Only people of the modern era have been so precise and consistent in their time keeping. And not as for long yet.
Getting a bit looser with it: I get an ever-growing feeling that the Mesoamerican civilizations had an intense sense of history and understanding of their own place in time from very early on.
Aside from just finding many more texts, the Holy Grail today would be to discover a bilingual text. Even a tiny fragment would, if nothing else, further confirm the depth of the cultural world that once existed.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lamojarra-inscriptio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/world/americas/teotihuaca...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cascajal-text.svg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...
One of the questions sometimes posed to the ancestors on the Oracle Bone inscriptions (the earliest known form of Chinese writing) are questions like: is today an auspicious day to sacrifice the prisoners?
> A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice (see figure 2 above).These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. “burial sacrifice”) refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to “volunteer” themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. “human offering sacrifice) is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony. The demographic pattern of Shang sacrificial victims is also quite interesting. Xunzang victims (or “volunteers”) were mostly personal slaves (i.e. house servants), and therefore in xunzang burial sites we could find a pretty even mix of male and female human remains. Renji victims, on the other hand, appears to be predominately male. [0]
It sounds like scientists actually revealed how to read a table of predictions in a document:
> Juteson and Lowry reject the long-standing assumption that the table was reset at its final position (that is, that it was intended to be used on a continuous loop, returning to month 1 after reaching month 405).
> The trouble is, using the table in this way doesn't actually work.
> ...Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.
The lack of accuracy of panchang is the result of accumulating calendric errors over centuries. Traditionally these used to get corrected by astronomical observations. However after the fall of Ujjain observatory the traditional / religious calendar has not been updated/corrected for centuries.
In fact right after independence India's first prime minister set up a calendar reform committee to update and modernise the traditional calendar. Top Indian scientists as well as scholars of Vedic scriptures were part of the committee.
To this day India government publishes these and updated positional astronomy records.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
> The inquisition expanded to other domains under the Spanish Crown, including Southern Italy and the Americas, while also targeting those accused of alumbradismo, Protestantism, witchcraft, blasphemy, bigamy, sodomy, Freemasonry, etc.
These metaphors are quite common across the world and over time gain many layers of knowledge. Go a little more east and you'll commonly see the 4 winds, the 4 cardinal directions, the 4 tastes, 4 [insert characteristics of medicinal properties] etc all mapped onto each other.
The most embarrassing part of humanity imo is the arrogance and disregard with which people sometimes approach other cultures
There’s an old line - “religion is the finger that points to the moon” - to your point about religion as a memory palace, most of these practices survived not because the sun god blessed them, but because they had tangible and durable benefits to the societies that practiced them.
I think their comment is coming from a place of having a very very HN typical but maybe taken to an extreme rational and fact driven "belief" system.
For example, you say that a solar eclipse is a "hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer". Personally, I can understand that rationally. I can understand that many if not most people can or will feel like that.
But I've witnessed multiple solar eclipses in my lifetime and while they were "cool", I had no "hauntingly humbling experience" whatsoever. It's something that happens and that we have a good scientific understanding of as to why and how it happens. End of story.
I can absolutely appreciate how (think final moments of "Pillars of the Earth") great it must have been to know these things, calculate them or at least understand what's happening when it's happening and use them for "population control". Does it benefit societies? Yes, probably on a general/global level. Like how are you gonna rationally explain and get a large populace to deal with end of winter / start of growing season food scarceness? The best and easiest way is to have them believe in your religion and that fasting is something your god requires/encourages. I firmly believe that that's why many major religions include this.
But as "me" in the modern world, it appalls me that someone thinks they can just tell whatever the eff they want and I'm supposed to do it coz "they speak for <$DEITY>".
The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you - that an object a quarter the diameter of our planet a couple hundred thousand miles away from us slid in front of the only real source of light and energy our planet has and temporarily cast us into night, with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever except to wait for the event to pass, that that inspired no awe or reflection in you about our place in the universe, our limitations as people, the degree to which we're subject to forces we have no impact over at all - I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.
The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you
with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever [...] that inspired no awe
reflection in you about our place in the universe
our limitations as people
I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.