sacred learning that enabled civilization to move forward. The mysteries of astronomy were kept hidden from them; they were never allowed to participate in the sacred propitiatory rites that ensured the benevolence of the gods; and there were a score of secret places in any temple into which women would never be admitted. A hundred rules were enforced to keep them obedient.
So when Cimi Xoc decided that his genius of a granddaughter should be instructed in the mathematical mysteries, it was a decision of tremendous significance, for it flouted the ancient belief that women should not be involved in such sacred matters. But like all keepers of treasured knowledge, he was determined that the lore he had accumulated during a long lifetime be preserved for later generations, realizing that it constituted an emotional bridge between past, present and future.
Ix Zubin had inherited this passionate respect for the history of her people and made repeated efforts to instill in her son a regard for his ancestry: “Our people are the wisest,” she told him. “Others are better at warfare, obviously, since strangers from the west did overrun us and install their gods in place of ours, but in all else we are supreme.” Her comments on history invariably referred to migration from the west, sometimes to relationships with the south, and occasionally to influences drifting down from the north, but the east where the great sea rolled was never mentioned.
Yet the Maya must have been known there. The green jade adornments so beloved by the Arawak and Carib women and the rubber balls so cherished by their men must have been transported from Maya lands, since there were no rubber trees or jade deposits on thelittle islands far out in the Caribbean. And there was the custom of applying heavy boards to make the foreheads of children, especially those of female babies, slant backward from the bridge of the nose. But how these things had reached those distant specks of land, neither Ix Zubin nor her learned grandfather nor any other chronicler of Maya history could say.
In other respects, Maya knowledge was prodigious in both volume and precision. Two thousand years before the old man made his calculations, Maya astronomers, always seeking to refine their measurements, had determined that the year was not 365 days long but 365:24. Europeans, who failed to achieve this precise computation, stumbled along with their calendar falling each year into deeper error. Not until 1582, nearly two centuries after Cimi Xoc’s death, did European astronomers catch up with the Maya, who had also determined that the journey of Venus through the heavens required exactly 583:92 days.
Such basic facts had for centuries been recorded in tables inscribed on papyruslike sheets and jealously guarded by the priests who perfected them by making minute adjustments. But the intellectual accomplishment of Cimi Xoc and his peers that would amaze subsequent civilizations was their ability to forecast eclipses of the sun: When the old man first showed his granddaughter the tables, he chanced to point to a date five hundred years in the future which indicated that on Sunday 29 March 1987 a total eclipse of the sun would occur. To Ix Zubin’s astonishment, her grandfather’s table of predictions continued through two hundred years beyond that.
Long before the birth of Christ the Maya had devised a multipart numerizing system which enabled them to calculate with the most elegant exactitude dates going back ten thousand years or more, and, for an equal span, into the future. In their five-number system the first figure represented a very large number, the second a somewhat smaller, the third a portion comparable to one year, the fourth the number of units close to a month, and the fifth the number of days.
When European scholars in the early twentieth century unlocked the secret of the Maya calendar system, they found that the precise day of the week for any date
So when Cimi Xoc decided that his genius of a granddaughter should be instructed in the mathematical mysteries, it was a decision of tremendous significance, for it flouted the ancient belief that women should not be involved in such sacred matters. But like all keepers of treasured knowledge, he was determined that the lore he had accumulated during a long lifetime be preserved for later generations, realizing that it constituted an emotional bridge between past, present and future.
Ix Zubin had inherited this passionate respect for the history of her people and made repeated efforts to instill in her son a regard for his ancestry: “Our people are the wisest,” she told him. “Others are better at warfare, obviously, since strangers from the west did overrun us and install their gods in place of ours, but in all else we are supreme.” Her comments on history invariably referred to migration from the west, sometimes to relationships with the south, and occasionally to influences drifting down from the north, but the east where the great sea rolled was never mentioned.
Yet the Maya must have been known there. The green jade adornments so beloved by the Arawak and Carib women and the rubber balls so cherished by their men must have been transported from Maya lands, since there were no rubber trees or jade deposits on thelittle islands far out in the Caribbean. And there was the custom of applying heavy boards to make the foreheads of children, especially those of female babies, slant backward from the bridge of the nose. But how these things had reached those distant specks of land, neither Ix Zubin nor her learned grandfather nor any other chronicler of Maya history could say.
In other respects, Maya knowledge was prodigious in both volume and precision. Two thousand years before the old man made his calculations, Maya astronomers, always seeking to refine their measurements, had determined that the year was not 365 days long but 365:24. Europeans, who failed to achieve this precise computation, stumbled along with their calendar falling each year into deeper error. Not until 1582, nearly two centuries after Cimi Xoc’s death, did European astronomers catch up with the Maya, who had also determined that the journey of Venus through the heavens required exactly 583:92 days.
Such basic facts had for centuries been recorded in tables inscribed on papyruslike sheets and jealously guarded by the priests who perfected them by making minute adjustments. But the intellectual accomplishment of Cimi Xoc and his peers that would amaze subsequent civilizations was their ability to forecast eclipses of the sun: When the old man first showed his granddaughter the tables, he chanced to point to a date five hundred years in the future which indicated that on Sunday 29 March 1987 a total eclipse of the sun would occur. To Ix Zubin’s astonishment, her grandfather’s table of predictions continued through two hundred years beyond that.
Long before the birth of Christ the Maya had devised a multipart numerizing system which enabled them to calculate with the most elegant exactitude dates going back ten thousand years or more, and, for an equal span, into the future. In their five-number system the first figure represented a very large number, the second a somewhat smaller, the third a portion comparable to one year, the fourth the number of units close to a month, and the fifth the number of days.
When European scholars in the early twentieth century unlocked the secret of the Maya calendar system, they found that the precise day of the week for any date
Similar Books
