The Maya Indians turned out to be incredibly strong astronomers who discovered and mastered the principles of planetary motion in the sky long before the creation of the heliocentric model by Nicolaus Copernicus, according to an article published in the Journal of Astronomy in Culture.
The so-called "Dresden Codex" is the oldest book written by the natives of the New World before the arrival of Columbus and other Europeans. This Mayan artifact, written in the 11th-12th centuries AD, is considered a copy of an older manuscript prepared by Indian sages in the 8th-9th centuries. Like the famous "Rosetta Stone" in the case of the language of the ancient Egyptians, this code served as the key to deciphering the writing of this mysterious culture of the Indians.
This 74-page book contains a lot of religious and scientific information about the life of the Maya, including information about various ceremonies, holidays, a number of mathematical and astronomical calculations, including predictions of eclipses and the nature of the movement of the moon in the sky, as well as a number of other interesting scientific and near-scientific information.
Lost in translation
Gerardo Aldana from the University of California at Santa Barbara (USA) studied one of the most interesting and so far obscure parts of this codex - the so-called Venus tablets, which, as historians previously believed, contained minor calculations of the motion of Venus in the sky and 584-day calendar based on these movements.
As the scientist notes, while we know the meaning of far from all the Mayan hieroglyphs present in this book (about 250 out of 350 characters), and therefore the meaning of many passages in the Dresden Codex historians and archaeologists have to guess. The first attempt was made by the German historian and mathematician Ernst Förstermann in 1887.
Aldana re-read the Venus tablets using new insights into the meaning of a number of hieroglyphs used in this part of the Dresden Codex. Quite unexpectedly, the scientist found out that these tablets are not just about the position of Venus in specific periods of time, but about a unique astronomical discovery, much ahead of the historical era when it was made.
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According to the American researcher, his colleagues paid attention to the calculations themselves and their accuracy, but did not peer at the preface, where it was actually written what these numbers meant and the strange inaccuracies in the calculations of Venus's orbits, which Ferstermann noticed.
Indian Copernicus
As it turned out, this preface dealt with a long-term calculation of the position of Venus in the firmament, which took into account those errors that arise hundreds and thousands of years later. The Maya well understood that Venus makes a "circle" in the sky and returns to the point where it was at the time of the beginning of observations, not in 584 days, but in 583.92 days. Using this figure, the tablet compilers calculated several corrective values and formulas to be applied to the Codex values to calculate the position of the planet.
Such a calculation system, according to Aldana, was impossible to come up with without understanding that Venus, the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun, and not vice versa, and real astronomical observations of the position of the planets in the sky. According to the scientist, such an observatory was located in Chichen Itza, in the so-called Karakol structure.
Moreover, these formulas and meanings for them, which were set forth in the Venusian tablets, similar to the famous formulas of Nicolaus Copernicus for synodic and sidereal periods of planetary rotation, allow us to say that the Mayan culture reached the level of Copernicus and other founders of European astronomy several centuries before making their discoveries, concludes Aldana.