003: How many days did the Mayans calculate in a year?

The Mayan calendar is the most perfect calendar in the world, and their calendar system consists of three calendars, namely, the divine calendar, the solar calendar and the long calendar.

The God Calendar, also known as Zalkin Calendar, consists of 20 images of gods and numbers from 1 to 13, and it lasts for 260 days every year. Just like heavenly stems and earthly branches in China, it is constantly matched and combined, and 260 combination icons are obtained, representing 260 days.

The solar calendar is based on astronomical calculations. A year is divided into 18 months, with 20 days in each month and 5 days as taboo days, so there are 365 days in the whole year. After long-term observation and careful calculation, the Maya, who are good at astrological observation, revised the length of a year to 365.4438+029 days, which is less than one thousandth of the absolute length of 365.438+098 days measured scientifically today!

Strangely, after 73 cycles, God just returned to the same mark as the 52-cycle solar year, thus forming a 52-year cycle, which made the Mayans believe that history would repeat itself again and again. And that day is the biggest festival of Maya, not only to celebrate, but also to rebuild all religious buildings. Archaeologists, while excavating the Mayan pyramids, have found many times more ancient pyramid temples inside the pyramids. Like a stone onion, it is peeled off layer by layer, and the interval between every two layers is 52 years.

Long calendars are very suitable for calculating long historical scales and are based on extremely developed mathematical thinking. Maya had a mathematical system called "the most brilliant product of human mind", and the most advanced in this system was the use of the symbol "0", which was invented and used earlier than the earliest non-ancient civilization India and about 800 years earlier than Europeans.

Using this computing system, the Mayans have been able to accurately record every day for tens of millions of years. According to the time when Spain invaded Maya16th century, and according to the counting unit recorded in the inscription, archaeologists found that the first year of the Mayan calendar was actually 3 1 14 BC and 13 BC!

The Mayans attached great importance to this complicated and elaborate calendar, and they recorded it in the stone carvings of many monuments and temples, as did the three remaining Mayan manuscripts. It is precisely because of such detailed chronological records that our understanding of Mayan history is much deeper than that of other peoples in America.

In the long history of endless cycles calculated in thousands of years, the Mayans realized that life and death are like the morning dew, and this strong sense of vicissitudes is the essence of the Maya world outlook, which makes their works of art full of praise for the infinite cycle of time and feelings about the shortness and vicissitudes of life.