Did old Maya observe Mercury?

Abstract

It is well known that the rich culture of old Maya contained, among other, also a very complicated and complex calendar, in which they recorded not only historical events, but also significant astronomical phenomena. Main source of information is the Dresden Codex, roughly covering the interval between 280 and 1325 AD. The problem of the so-called correlation between Mayan and our calendars (expressing the difference between Long Count of Mayan calendar and Julian date) is very old, there exist about fifty different solutions that mutually differ by up to hundreds of years. Out of these, historians mostly accept the so-called Goodman - Martínez - Thompson (GMT) value of 584 283 days, which is based almost entirely on historical events. On the contrary, we stressed very precisely dated astronomical data, demonstrated the contradictions of GMT with them, and derived the so-called Böhm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days, which is in excellent agreement with astronomical phenomena recorded in Dresden Codex. Maya researchers are mostly convinced that Maya did not pay much attention to Mercury. Here we conclude that the truth is opposite; we analyze the data in Dresden Codex and find many records corresponding to visibility of Mercury near its maximum elongations from the Sun, and also to their conjunctions.

Keywords

• ephemerides
• planets and satellites: individual: mercury
• history and philosophy of astronomy
• time