Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Dresden Codex

Here is a fair summary of the Dresden Codex, pages 69–74. The article is from 2001 so postdates Linda Schiele and her crew. The Maya glyphs should be comprehensible. As an astronomic table, cyphers will do even without knowing the language; pages 43b–45b were basically sussed out a century ago, as the authors point out.

I don't know if the language is Yucatec or Choltal, or something else.

The last date is 10.11.4.0.14 which is 8 January AD 1051...Gregorian. (Julian would be better, for at least two reasons.) Presumably this is when the autograph got inked.

Although, I expect the earlier dates for the Mars conjunction come from Classic archetypes. Other dates fall in years AD 664, 702, 741, 786, 817. Then a gap until 1012. That near-two-century gap implies, I suspect, that the archetypes were Choltal; I understand the Yucatec Maya did not suffer so hard from the collapse.

No comments:

Post a Comment