Page 163 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

days, a minus error of only 0.0002 of a day.
10
Similarly, the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth.
Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days—extremely close to the
true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.
11
The Mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for
the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses and were aware that these could
occur only within plus or minus eighteen days of the node (when the
moon’s path crosses the apparent path of the sun). Finally, the Maya
12
were remarkably accomplished mathematicians. They possessed an
advanced technique of metrical calculation by means of a chequerboard
device we ourselves have only discovered (or rediscovered?) in the last
century. They also understood perfectly and used the abstract concept
13
of zero and were acquainted with place numerations.
14
These are esoteric fields. As Thompson observed,
The cipher (nought) and place numerations are so much parts of our cultural
heritage and seem such obvious conveniences that it is difficult to comprehend
how their invention could have been long delayed. Yet neither ancient Greece with
its great mathematicians, nor ancient Rome, had any inkling of either nought or
place numeration. To write 1848 in Roman numerals requires eleven letters:
MDCCCXLVIII. Yet the Maya had a system of place-value notation very much like
15
our own at a time when the Romans were still using their clumsy method.
Isn’t it a bit odd that this otherwise unremarkable Central American tribe
should, at such an early date, have stumbled upon an innovation which
Otto Neugebauer, the historian of science, has described as ‘one of the
most fertile inventions of humanity’.
16

Someone else’s science?

Let us now consider the question of Venus, a planet that was of immense
symbolic importance to all the ancient peoples of Central America, who
identified it strongly with Quetzalcoatl (or Gucumatz or Kukulkan, as the
Plumed Serpent was known in the Maya dialects).
17
Unlike the Ancient Greeks, but like the Ancient Egyptians, the Maya
understood that Venus was both ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening

10 William Gates’s notes (p. 81) to Diego de Landa’s Yucatan before and after the
Conquest.
11 This is evident from the Dresden Codex. See, for example, An Introduction to the
Study of Maya Hieroglyphs, p. 32.
12 The Maya, p. 176; Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 291; The Rise and Fall of
Maya Civilization, p. 173.
13 Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 287.
14 The Maya, p. 173.
The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, pp. 178-9.
15
16 Cited in The Maya, p. 173.
17 World Mythology, p. 241.

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