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The Dresden Codex is a Maya book, which was believed to be the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. [1] However, in September 2018 it was proven that the Maya Codex of Mexico , previously known as the Grolier Codex, is, in fact, older by about a century. [ 2 ]
Dresden Codex, one of the few collections of pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphic texts known to have survived the book burnings by the Spanish clergy during the 16th century (others include the Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices). It contains astronomical calculations—eclipse-prediction tables, the.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- Celestial Fix
- Venus, Warrior Planet?
- Universal Language
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A new look at the Dresden Codex may change our understanding of the ways the Maya used the night sky to plan their ceremonial calendars.
To the modern stargazer, the planet Venus is just another point of light in the night sky. But for the ancient Maya, the brilliant light of Venus was an omen of war that guided ritual activity, prompted great battles, and was even used as shorthand for “total destruction.”
Archaeologists have long looked to Venus to understand Maya calendars and tradition. But now, a fresh look at an ancient text called the Dresden Codex suggests that our understanding of how the Maya tracked Venus for their celestial calendars may be all wrong.
By combining a new reading of the text, tricky mathematical equations, and field observations, Gerardo Aldana at the University of California, Santa Barbara has simplified the way Maya scribes would have corrected their calendars.
“There is some really elegant math that’s going on there that has not been recognized before,” says Aldana.
His work not only casts new light on how the Maya tied their ceremonies to the sky, it may also call into question every date we have for events in the ancient Maya world. (Also see “Teen's 'Discovery' of Maya City Is a Very Western Mistake.”)
Scientists have long known that ancient Mesoamerican cultures were fascinated with the night sky, but many details of how they tracked celestial objects were lost to the ravages of time and conquest. The Dresden Codex (named for the European city in which it has been housed since the mid-1700s) is one of four texts remaining out of thousands that existed before Europeans arrived in the New World.
Like many of these precious books, the Dresden Codex has been examined and reexamined countless times by archaeologists and other experts skilled in deciphering ancient texts. A favorite section has been the so-called Venus tables, which provided ancient skygazers with a correction tool for their calendars.
Ancient Mesoamericans used two interlocking yet unrelated calendar cycles. The 365-day solar calendar, called the haab, tracked the movement of the sun, while a second ceremonial one called the tzolkin followed a 260-day track linked to ceremonies and celebrations. Think of it like the days of the week, if a week lasted 260 days and each day had its own cultural significance.
However, since the actual solar year is 365.25 days long, the Maya had to correct for the extra quarter day, just as we do now by adding leap days to the calendar every four years. (Read about the surprising history of the leap year).
To make their corrections, the Maya used the planet Venus. Looking through their ancient texts, they could tell where Venus was on a particular day hundreds of years before, and thus where it should have been at the time someone looked in the sky. The difference was the amount of correction necessary.
But it’s not as easy as that. For more than a hundred years, experts have reconstructed the equations the Maya would have used, based partly on the Dresden Codex. What they landed on is a complex series of patches and changes that create a hyper-precise calendar system similar to our own.
Aldana says this new reading suggests the Maya were less concerned about precision and more concerned with preserving their 260-day ceremonial calendar. He compares it to the Catholic church’s struggle in the 16th century to create an accurate calendar to guide Easter celebrations, efforts which ultimately gave us the Gregorian calendar still in use today.
“Their ability to predict the stars’ positions was affecting their ability to plan their religious events,” he says. His work thus moves Maya star-gazing “more into the realm of state-sponsored ritual—of large-scale ceremony.”
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In a cave in Mexico's Yucatán, a National Geographic explorer reveals what is believed to have been an underground observatory for witnessing the zenith passage of the sun.
It’s no small thing, since for decades the Maya have been popularly known as precision astronomers who used the sky to predict the future. And they were not the only Mesoamericans who tracked things like Venus.
Harvey Bricker, an emeritus professor at Tulane University, agrees that the Maya corrected their calendars by tracking Venus and that the calendars had ceremonial purposes, but he sees no reason that they would have favored the ceremonial calendar. He also cautions against tweaking the existing Maya calendar until there is stronger evidence that we require such a change.
“The fact that [the current system of correction] is used by others is not because it is popular, but rather because there is solid historical and astronomical evidence that it is the correct one,” he writes in an email. “Failure to use it is a fatal flaw in Dr. Aldana's research.”
Aldana says his work doesn’t have to affect any established dates; that’s only a possibility. For him, the most thrilling part of this work had nothing to do with its interpretation but rather with the cold, hard math.
As he worked on the Dresden Codex, he felt a kinship with the ancient unnamed scholar who was wrestling with the same equations. Understanding the math, he says, helped him understand the people.
“It’s the language of math that you are speaking through,” he says, “and that’s just really profound.”
Follow Erik Vance on Twitter and Instagram.
A new reading of the Dresden Codex, an ancient Maya text, suggests that they used Venus to correct their ceremonial calendar, not their solar one. This challenges the conventional view of the Maya as precise astronomers and raises questions about the accuracy of their dates.
The Maya Codex in the SLUB Dresden is the highest quality and the most content-rich codex of the 4 Maya manuscripts preserved worldwide originated in the later post-classical period of Maya culture (ca. 1300-1521) on the Yucatán peninsula
Learn about the history and content of the Dresden Codex, one of the ancient Maya hieroglyphic books. See images and links of different editions, facsimiles and digital versions of the codex.
The Dresden Codex is the oldest and best preserved of four Mayan manuscripts in the world. It contains astronomical, calendrical and divinatory information, and is held by the Saxon State and University Library in Germany.
About 85% of the approximately 5,000 surviving text carriers can now be read or at least their content can be interpreted. The Dresden Codex contains 350 different characters, of which 250 have been deciphered so far.
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