Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries
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Scientists have discovered how the Maya civilization predicted eclipses centuries ago, shedding new light on their advanced astronomical knowledge. With no comments, the discussion is non-existent, but the story itself is a fascinating look at ancient science.
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These metaphors are quite common across the world and over time gain many layers of knowledge. Go a little more east and you'll commonly see the 4 winds, the 4 cardinal directions, the 4 tastes, 4 [insert characteristics of medicinal properties] etc all mapped onto each other.
The most embarrassing part of humanity imo is the arrogance and disregard with which people sometimes approach other cultures
There’s an old line - “religion is the finger that points to the moon” - to your point about religion as a memory palace, most of these practices survived not because the sun god blessed them, but because they had tangible and durable benefits to the societies that practiced them.
The lack of accuracy of panchang is the result of accumulating calendric errors over centuries. Traditionally these used to get corrected by astronomical observations. However after the fall of Ujjain observatory the traditional / religious calendar has not been updated/corrected for centuries.
In fact right after independence India's first prime minister set up a calendar reform committee to update and modernise the traditional calendar. Top Indian scientists as well as scholars of Vedic scriptures were part of the committee.
To this day India government publishes these and updated positional astronomy records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_national_calendar
It sounds like scientists actually revealed how to read a table of predictions in a document:
> Juteson and Lowry reject the long-standing assumption that the table was reset at its final position (that is, that it was intended to be used on a continuous loop, returning to month 1 after reaching month 405).
> The trouble is, using the table in this way doesn't actually work.
> ...Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.
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