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The Mayan 260-day sacred year, structured on 13 and 20-day periods, aligns with solar and Venus calendars. Robert D. Peden emphasizes its accuracy in syncing with tropical years over cycles, suggesting a profound astronomical foundation for Mesoamerican calendars. This reveals ancestral knowledge of cosmic time systems integral to their culture.
diagram: the interaction of two types of week creating a sacred calendar of 260 days. text: from Sacred Number blog, Saturday, November 8, 2008
In 2008, William Sullivan sent me an explanation for why the Mayan time system used 260 days as a sacred or ritual year, counting 13 and 20 day periods (that divide into this), to characterize days of one’s birth.
Continue reading “Exploring the Astronomical Basis of the 260-Day Almanac”One could ask “if I make a times table of 29.53059 days, what numbers of lunar months give a nearly whole number of days?”. In practice, the near anniversary of 37 lunar months and three solar years contains the number 32 which gives 945 days on a metrological photo study I made of Le Manio’s southern curb (kerb in UK) stones, where 32 lunar months in day-inches could be seen to be 944.97888 inches from the center of the sun gate. This finding would have allowed the lunar month to be approximated to high accuracy in the megalithic of 4000 BC as being 945/32 = 29.53125 days.
Silhouette of day-inch photo survey after 2010 Spring Equinox Quantification of the Quadrilateral.
One can see above that the stone numbered 32 from the Sun Gate is exactly 32/36 of the three lunar years of day-inch counting found indexed in the southern curb to the east (point X). The flat top of stone 36 hosts the end of 36 lunar months (point Q) while the end of stone 37 locates the end of three solar years (point Q’). If that point is the end of a rope fixed at point P, then arcing that point Q’ to the north will strike the dressed edge of point R, thus forming Robin Heath’s proposed Lunation Triangle within the quadrilateral as,
points P – Q – R !
In this way, the numerical signage of the Southern Curb matches the use of day-inch counting over three years while providing the geometrical form of the lunation triangle which is itself half of the simpler geometry of a 4 by 1 rectangle.
The key additional result shows that 32 lunar months were found to be, by the builders (and then myself), equal to 945 days (try searching this site for 945 and 32 to find more about this key discovery). Many important numerical results flow from this.
Above: Title Slide of my 2015 Lecture
Counting the lunar month has a deep history, reaching right into prehistory. Firstly, how does one find a phenomenon that gives a whole number of days. Its actual length is now known to be 29.53059 days, and to give a whole number just two lunar months gives 59 days, leaving just 1.8 days too little. But never mind, for the stone age this looks promising but how can one observe the moon at a fixed point and which phase is best to count.
Within a day, before or after the full moon, the Moon looks pretty full, changing little and offering no decisive moment between to count between two full moons. For this reason, a few prehistoric bones give clues to their method which involved counting days with some mark representing the Moon’s phase. This led to the sickle/cresent marks to left “(” or right “)” and between these a round mark “O” and dashes of dark or invisible moon “-“. These are what Alexander Marshack saw in the Albard Plaque, carved on a flat bone from a midden:
Figure 1 (left) Alexander Marshack investigating marked bones in Europe and a crucial interpretation of a 30,000 year old bone as a double lunar month of counting. From my 2015 lecture in Glastonbury about my work prior to Sacred Number and the Lords of Time in 2014.
Marshack demonstrated plausible evidence that consecutive day marks were used in the stone age, stylised to indicate lunar phase within a pattern recognizing that two lunar months formed a recurrent structure in time in a whole number of days, namely 58 days. The utility of the calendric device was that the cycle could be visualized as a whole, making the plaque an icon of both knowledge and meaning. This could be shared but also gave the possessor of this small bone, a power to predict when hunting is possible in lighter nights the light cycle of the moon. In addition, the moon’s phase locates the location of the sun and how many hours were left before the dawn. The bone was an overview of a daily process during most of which the moon is visible by night and day.
In following posts I look at many other ways to count the month, based on longer counts and also look at where in the lunar phases one can best start and stop counting.
You may like to watch my lecture at Megalithomania
(which starts with an ad you may skip).
There are two things we can count in this world, one is the number of objects on the Earth and the other is the number of time periods between events in the Sky.
photo: The Moon, with Jupiter and Mars, on 11th January 2018. (see end for interpretation)
Objects are counted in an extensive way, from one to an almost infinite number, the count extending with each addition (or multiplication) of a population.
Time periods appear similar but in fact they emanate from measurable recurrences, such as phases of the moon, and these derive from the behaviour of celestial objects as they divide into each other.
For instance, the unit called the day is created by the rotation of the earth relative to the Sun and the lunar month by its orbit around the Earth relative to the Sun, and so on.
Thus, time originally came from the sky. Furthermore, it largely came from the zodiacal band of stars surrounding the Earth within which the planets, Sun and Moon progress eastwards. The Earth’s own orbital motion is superimposed upon those of the other planets and the inner planets (Mercury and Venus) also appear to orbit a Sun that appears to orbit the Earth once a year.
The zodiacal band is naturally divided up into a number of constellations or stars and about three thousand years ago it became popular to follow the Sun throughout the year into 12 constellations whilst the Moon tends to create 27 or 28 stars (nakshatras) where the Moon might sit on a given evening. When the moon is illuminated by the sun, the primordial month has 29 1/2 days and twelve such in less than a year hence perhaps first defining the 12-ness of our months within the year.
Continue reading “Inside Time”If one takes the figure of 940 feet (that is, 286.512 meters) as the side length factorizing 940 gives 20 x 47 and 47 (a prime number) times 5 gives 235 which is the number of lunar months in 19 solar years: the Metonic period. image by Google Earth
This is the larger of three bounding periods for the sun, moon, and earth. The lower boundary is exactly 19 eclipse years, called the Saros eclipse period of 18.03 solar years. . Within that range of 18-19 years lies the moon’s nodal period of 18.618 years, this being the time taken for the two lunar nodes, of the lunar orbit, to travel once backwards around the ecliptic. It is only at these nodal points that eclipses of sun and moon can occur, when both bodies are sitting on the nodes.
Continue reading “The Metonic Period at Ushtogai Square”ABOVE: Stela C from Tres Zapotes roughly rebuilt by Ludovic Celle and based on a drawing by Miguel Covarrubias.
The archaeological view regarding the Maya, and their root progenitor the Olmec (1500 BCE onwards), is that cultural innovations were made within Mexico alongside an agrarian revolution consisting the “three sisters“, squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans. This agriculture led to civilizing skills and it reads like the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia after 4000 BCE, where irrigation made the fertile loam able to realize agricultural innovations from the northern golden triangle, leading to writing, trade, city states, religion, arithmetic and so on, all in isolation from European or Asian civilizations. The notion of diffusion from the ancient near east, or from India, could have occurred through ocean conveyors, of ocean currents and trade winds, has been proposed but never accepted. Yet there are reasons to think that, the astronomy and monumentalism of the pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations has clear precedents in the ancient near east and Asia.
Continue reading “Origins of the Olmec/Maya Number Sciences”
