Page 162 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

outstanding achievement of Mayan society was its observational
astronomy, upon which, through the medium of advanced mathematical
calculations, was based a clever, complex, sophisticated and very
accurate calendar?

Knowledge out of place

In 1954 J. Eric Thompson, a leading authority on the archaeology of
Central America, confessed to a deep sense of puzzlement at a number
of glaring disparities he had identified between the generally
unremarkable achievements of the Mayas, as a whole and the advanced
state of their astro-calendrical knowledge, ‘What mental quirks,’ he
asked, ‘led the Maya intelligentsia to chart the heavens, yet fail to grasp
the principle of the wheel; to visualize eternity, as no other semi-civilized
people has ever done, yet ignore the short step from corbelled to true
arch; to count in millions, yet never to learn to weigh a sack of corn?’
9
Perhaps the answer to these questions is much simpler than Thompson
realized. Perhaps the astronomy, the deep understanding of time, and the
long-term mathematical calculations, were not ‘quirks’ at all. Perhaps
they were the constituent parts of a coherent but very specific body of
knowledge that the Maya had inherited, more or less intact, from an older
and wiser civilization. Such an inheritance would explain the
contradictions observed by Thompson, and there is no need for any
dispute on the point. We already know that the Maya received their
calendar as a legacy from the Olmecs (a thousand years earlier, the
Olmecs were using exactly the same system). The real question, should
be, where did the Olmecs get it? What kind of level of technological and
scientific development was required for a civilization to devise a calendar
as good as this?
Take the case of the solar year. In modern Western society we still make
use of a solar calendar which was introduced in Europe in 1582 and is
based on the best scientific knowledge then available: the famous
Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar, which it replaced, computed the
period of the earth’s orbit around the sun at 365.25 days. Pope Gregory
XIII’s reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation: 365.2425
days. Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the
exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days. The Gregorian calendar
therefore incorporates a very small plus error, just 0.0003 of a day—
pretty impressive accuracy for the sixteenth century.
Strangely enough, though its origins are wrapped in the mists of
antiquity far deeper than the sixteenth century, the Mayan calendar
achieved even greater accuracy. It calculated the solar year at 365.2420

9 J. Eric Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, Pimlico, London, 1993, p. 13.

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