alt.hn

7/14/2026 at 11:40:34 AM

Mathematical texts from a Maya site in Guatemala identify an ancient astronomer

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02170-8

by homarp

7/15/2026 at 12:12:48 AM

The article being discussed (with reconstructed glyph drawings and description):

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/id...

(PDF button not working for me, but looks like entire contents are here in HTML).

by ks2048

7/15/2026 at 2:50:51 PM

> PDF button not working for me

That probably is caused by some setting of your browser, like disabling scripts or disabling pop-ups.

Works for me (Firefox on Linux).

by adrian_b

7/15/2026 at 10:50:07 PM

I think it got fixed since the parent comment was posted, because I was not able to download at the time either, and now it works.

In the meantime I tried to find the file with archive.org, seeing what other URLs were archived under the Cambridge University Press website and found many other interesting articles.

by lioeters

7/15/2026 at 7:29:20 AM

Their writing system is so cool. Glyphs are like graffiti.

by ozgung

7/14/2026 at 11:59:00 PM

Oooh Cool. Math Bragging by "White Chested Fox" (Sak Tahn Waax), ca 800AD:

   The formula shows how one 2,920-day cycle could be divided up into the calendar units used by the Maya people. This 2,920-day cycle was important because it tied together key astronomical cycles, corresponding to both five Venus cycles (584 days each) and eight solar years (365 days each). However, the Text 19 calculations also relate the 2,920 days to Uinal (months with 20 days), Tzolkin (the 260-day sacred calendar), Tun (a year with 360 days) and Mars years of 780 days.

by vessenes

7/15/2026 at 12:32:09 AM

What do Tun and Mars have to do with each other?

by throwaway27448

7/15/2026 at 11:01:21 AM

I think that in effect this text is just a guy bragging about finding divisors of 2920 that happened to have cultural significance.

It's like finding that 42 (meaning of everything), 67 (six seven) and 69 (nice) all divide 1991 (they probably don't), and then writing it down because it seems cool.

by SiempreViernes

7/15/2026 at 1:49:29 AM

You just need to read White Chested Fox's math brag to understand it!

by vessenes

7/15/2026 at 1:08:43 AM

It's a shame how much was lost from some of these civilizations after colonialism. So much cool stuff gone forever.

by unitindex

7/15/2026 at 4:43:03 AM

> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

> -- Yucatan Before and After the Conquest (1562) written by Bishop Diego de Landa who hosted mass book burnings

by lioeters

7/15/2026 at 11:59:25 AM

Ironically though, de Landa's curiosity about the Maya language ultimately led to its translation in modern times. Without the written 'alphabet' that he had a Maya scribe write down for him at the time, it's likely that Maya script would still be a mystery cipher.

by suzzer99

7/15/2026 at 3:33:43 AM

[flagged]

by applicative

7/15/2026 at 3:48:14 AM

While overly confident, your response is not factually correct. Are you familiar with Francisco de Montejo, a Spanish conquistador who burnt innumerable Mayan historical documents etc?

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Montejo

by kci225

7/15/2026 at 3:58:25 AM

The Spaniards can have been as nothing compared to the Mayans themselves. The composition of these codices was at its peak hundreds of years earlier and zero survived the reciprocal annihilation that had not a trace of influence from the Spaniards who were under direct Arab colonial domination that was to last longer than any in the post columbian period.

by applicative

7/15/2026 at 4:01:36 AM

So I guess that answers my question.

by kci225

7/15/2026 at 3:47:46 AM

Only four Maya codices survived destruction by the Spanish…

by throwaway_7274

7/15/2026 at 3:56:00 AM

Exactly zero of what must have been countless thousands of codices, whole limitless libraries, survived the reciprocal destruction of the Mayan polities.

by applicative

7/15/2026 at 4:07:39 AM

No cultural destruction visited by the Spaniards on the Mayan peoples can hold a candle to the destruction visited, centuries earlier, by the Mayans upon themselves, and from which their spectactular civilization never recovered.

by applicative

7/15/2026 at 8:00:31 PM

I see a link like this on HNews which sounds amazing, read through it, it is amazing.

Then my first thought is to post it to HackerNews, my second thought being that’s where I found it.

by zeristor

7/15/2026 at 1:46:43 AM

I wonder how intelligible classical Maya is with modern Maya languages/points on the Maya continuum. For instance, does the classical word for fox share any resemblance to any Maya word for it today?

I can imagine it going either way really but would probably guess there was vastly more drift in the case of Maya. I would naively guess that the printing press would have a dampening effect on language drift, and that the kind of repression of both the language and culture under colonialism would encourage it.

by vector_spaces

7/15/2026 at 1:20:01 AM

I still can't reconcile how they didn't use the wheel for transportation. The explanations of lack of draft animals and unsuitable terrain aren't great. Not even a wheelbarrow?

by winterbourne

7/15/2026 at 5:42:43 AM

They knew about the wheel (as some of their children toys had them), so the explanation is easy: They did not find it effective. Completely understandable. I spent my youth walking (and carrying a lot) in nature, and not once would I have tried to use a wheeled wagon and definitely not a wheelbarrow during those excursions. If I had a draft animal I would have used it to carry stuff (as people do, with horses and dogs), not a wagon with wheels - that would have been totally impractical. And the terrain where I grew up is way easier, by several orders of magnitude, than what I could see when I visited Yucatan some years ago.

by Tor3

7/15/2026 at 7:16:58 AM

I use my wheelbarrow to do work around my mountain property all the time. We have a 4-wheel utility cart that sees a lot of service too. Their utility lies in doing work over short distances.

by winterbourne

7/15/2026 at 12:01:28 PM

So then we can conclude that for the type of work they did, in the area they did, they did not find it practical to use anything wheeled to help out. They knew about wheels, as already mentioned, so they obviously would have utilized wheels if that would have been effective. And they didn't, so it wasn't.

by Tor3

7/15/2026 at 9:41:20 AM

[dead]

by z0ltan

7/15/2026 at 5:40:17 AM

Premodernist has a good video on why certain societies didn't develop wheelbarrows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRnwg3dpboc

It mostly boils down to us overestimating the utility of wheelbarrows from the perspective of our modern, cushy lives. Ancient humans are not dumb and have as much desire to avoid labor as we do.

by Evidlo

7/15/2026 at 7:36:21 AM

This was interesting; thank you. He admits that he can't really answer this question. His point about technology seeming obvious in retrospect is similar to the Egg of Columbus idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

The video hints at the notion that they may just have not figured it out. Certainly working iron and steel would have been extremely useful, but they never developed that ability either, even after thousands of years of civilization. The interplay of a wheel and an axle may not be as intuitive as it seems to us in modern times.

One of the more esoteric explanations that I have heard is that there was a religious taboo around easing manual labor. And that the wheeled (and axled) figurines that we have found were not children's toys, but religious objects.

by winterbourne

7/14/2026 at 11:17:26 PM

What's the formula tho?

by behringer

7/15/2026 at 2:38:20 AM

Someone linked to the paper but basically it was pointing out a number was a multiple of X venus years and also Y solar years, but also it was a sum of different multiples of important astronomical values as well.

by Herodotus38