#Ancient glyphs software
#Ancient glyphs code

“Now we know what they were doing with the astronomy,” Freidel said. Only a sophisticated star chart could have allowed Chan Bahlum to make the correlation, Freidel said, and only an audience enslaved to the heavens would have cared. One tablet states that First Mother became king of Palenque on the same day of the year as the Maya creation date in 3114 BC. By linking his clan to First Mother, Chan Bahlum validated the unorthodox matrilineal basis of his family’s power, Freidel says. Tablets that Chan Bahlum erected to celebrate his coronation as king of Palenque in AD 690 exemplify the political uses to which celestial readings were put.Ĭhan Bahlum’s grandmother, Zak-Kuk, is described with the same glyph that names First Mother, a mythical ancestor. These glyphs reveal the bellicose history of monarchical city-states in which “blood was the mortar of society,” in Schele’s words.ĭavid Freidel, who, with Schele, wrote the recent book “Forest of Kings,” said the Mayan rulers manipulated astronomy to justify or protect their ventures.

#Ancient glyphs code

Over the last 30 years, Schele, Mathews and about a dozen other epigraphers have broken the code of the faded squiggles and dots.

Their system of mathematics, including a concept of zero, was an achievement not equaled in Europe until centuries later.īut until about 1960, the inability to read glyphs other than those concerned with esoterica led many experts to conclude that the Maya had been a peaceful, priestly race of time-obsessed stargazers.

They recorded calendrics, astronomy, history and religion. “Unlike the people of so many other ancient civilizations, like the Mesopotamians, the Maya’s links to the past have been kept alive-under the guise of Christianity.”Īrcheologists have known for a century that the Maya of what is called the Classic Period, roughly AD 300 to AD 900, were masters of abstract knowledge, the only American Indian culture to develop an original system of writing. “What is tremendously exciting is that we’ve got the present-day Maya to help us understand,” said Peter Mathews, an epigrapher, or hieroglyphic expert, at the University of Calgary in Canada. Scientists will have consult computers to see the sky. In 150 years or less, it may be impossible to see the Milky Way anywhere in the world because of light pollution, Schele says. It symbolized Christ’s Ascension, Schele said, but also coincides with the rebirth of the Mayas’ First Father, co-creator of their world. The observation of the heavens nominally marks the Resurrection of Christ, but it takes place at the same time of year as the “Raising of the Sky” described in monuments such as the 7th Century Tablet of the Cross at the city of Palenque, whose ruins lie 80 miles to the north.Īt midnight, as Schele watched, the Milky Way rose perpendicular to the horizon above the wooden crosses that tower over the hill.

She described the vigil as an outgrowth of the old knowledge, though it has a Christian camouflage and the Chamula Maya probably are unaware of its origins.

On March 5, she attended a late-night vigil in the southern Mexico town of San Juan Chamula.

#Ancient glyphs software

Using the few remaining books in Mayan script, as well as modern tools such as computer software that can display on the screen a picture of the sky on any night in the last 6,000 years, Schele linked baroque imagery salvaged from the mossy walls of ruined temples with modern Mayan celestial observations.