The Mayan temple of Tikal in Guatemala is about a day’s walk from Xultun, where researchers discovered mathematical formulas scrawled on the walls.Credit: Kryssia Campos/Getty A mathematical formula inscribed on a wall at the Mayan site of Xultún in Guatemala has revealed for the first time the name of an important Mayan mathematician and astronomer.
The Mayan temple of Tikal in Guatemala is about a day’s walk from Xultun, where researchers discovered mathematical formulas scrawled on the walls.Credit: Kryssia Campos/Getty
A mathematical formula inscribed on a wall at the Mayan site of Xultún in Guatemala has revealed for the first time the name of an important Mayan mathematician and astronomer. Researchers suggest that Sak Tahn Waax, or ‘White-breasted Fox’, was a scholar comparable to the mathematical giants of the past.
In a study published July 14 in the journal Antique1Heather Hurst, an archaeologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and her colleagues describe their analysis of a mathematical text from a chamber at Xultun that was originally excavated in 2011.2.
The walls of the chamber are painted with human figures and hieroglyphic texts. These include mathematical calculations based on astronomical calendars, which were used by the Mayans to decide the timing of events such as the inaugurations of kings. Hurst and his colleagues suggest that the chamber was a workspace for scribes producing codices in the mid-8th century. advertisement.
The authors analyzed one set of hieroglyphs in particular, called Text 19. Hurst says this set of mathematical calculations expresses the relationships between various calendar systems in a fun way that hasn’t been seen before in Mayan texts. “I think it was a math flex. Someone was like, ‘I have this amazing pattern, and it’s so good it needs to be written down.’ It was like, ‘Boom! Mic drop!'” Hurst says.
“The discovery shows that the Mayans were very intelligent, creative and intellectually curious people who taught, learned and sometimes did mathematics just for the sake of it,” says Eric Heller, an archaeologist at Dornsife University of Southern California.
Identity revealed
Text 19 is a small L-shaped group of eleven hieroglyphs with a combined height of about 10 centimeters. Hurst and his colleagues discovered that the first nine hieroglyphs of the set encode the Mayan calendar and astronomical cycles.
The formula shows how a cycle of 2,920 days could be divided into the calendar units used by the Mayans. This 2,920-day cycle was important because it linked key astronomical cycles, corresponding to five Venus cycles (584 days each) and eight solar years (365 days each). However, the calculations in Text 19 also relate the 2,920 days to uinal (months with 20 days), Tzolkin (the sacred calendar of 260 days), Barrel (a year with 360 days) and Mars years of 780 days.
“It’s just super nerdy math,” Hurst says. The hieroglyphs also show partial dates, which made them difficult to decipher. “They’re doing this shorthand, so they give you the first half of a notation and the second half is implied.”
The mathematical formula of Text 19 appears as glyphs.Credit: Photography by G. Ware, courtesy of the San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project
Until now, the identities of the mathematician-astronomers behind such calculations remained a mystery. Hurst and his colleagues found a phrase in the penultimate hieroglyph of Text 19 that means “thus he says.” This was followed by the name Sak Tahn Waax, in the final hieroglyph, suggesting that the writer was taking credit for the calculation. “We know it’s a male name because it’s missing a prefix,” he says.
The fact that the writer is named is significant because it suggests that mathematicians were as recognized in Mayan society as artists, says Gerardo Aldana, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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