(PDF button not working for me, but looks like entire contents are here in HTML).
vessenes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 4 hours ago [-]
What do Tun and Mars have to do with each other?
vessenes 3 hours ago [-]
You just need to read White Chested Fox's math brag to understand it!
vector_spaces 3 hours ago [-]
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.
unitindex 3 hours ago [-]
It's a shame how much was lost from some of these civilizations after colonialism. So much cool stuff gone forever.
applicative 52 minutes ago [-]
The abstract, mechanized, non-serious, motorized, might-as-well-be-AI-slop character of complaints about 'colonialism' in general is demonstrated very clearly here ... when with minimal retention of junior high knowledge you would recall that the Maya ascendency ended centuries before the Spanish accidentally infected the Americas with small pox.
The mathematician in question was active during the Arab conquests. Spain was under colonial Muslim rule. The Maya states were exterminating recalcitrant villages, man woman and child, over and over.
kci225 38 minutes ago [-]
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 Are you familiar with Francisco de Montejo, a Spanish conquistador who burnt innumerable Mayan historical documents etc?
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.
kci225 24 minutes ago [-]
So I guess that answers my question.
throwaway_7274 38 minutes ago [-]
Only four Maya codices survived destruction by the Spanish…
applicative 30 minutes ago [-]
Exactly zero of what must have been countless thousands of codices, whole limitless libraries, survived the reciprocal destruction of the Mayan polities.
applicative 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
17 hours ago [-]
behringer 5 hours ago [-]
What's the formula tho?
Herodotus38 2 hours ago [-]
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.
winterbourne 3 hours ago [-]
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?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/id...
(PDF button not working for me, but looks like entire contents are here in HTML).
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.
The mathematician in question was active during the Arab conquests. Spain was under colonial Muslim rule. The Maya states were exterminating recalcitrant villages, man woman and child, over and over.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Montejo