Maya Science, Mathematics, and Astronomy

Maya science was not a single, neatly bounded discipline but a tightly interwoven set of practices in which astronomy, arithmetic, calendrics, healing, and ritual reinforced one another. The scribes, priests, and healers who developed it left no theoretical treatises, but their surviving inscriptions, four surviving screenfold codices, and the architectural orientations of their temples and cities reveal a quantitative tradition of striking sophistication. Long before European contact in the sixteenth century, the people of the lowlands and highlands of Mesoamerica had independently devised a true place-value number system, identified the cycles of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn with positional corrections, predicted solar and lunar eclipses over decades-long spans, and refined a pharmacopoeia that combined empirical observation with ritual purgation.

The three pages that hang beneath this overview explore the three principal domains of that tradition: the Maya number system and the concept of zero, Maya astronomy, stars, planets, and eclipses, and Maya medicine, healers, and herbal remedies. The pages that follow set those domains in their wider cultural context.

Mathematics: a positional, vigesimal tradition

The arithmetic of the ancient Maya was vigesimal — built on a base of 20 — and positional, meaning that the value of a digit depended on the column it occupied. Three written signs carried every integer from zero to nineteen: a dot for one, a horizontal bar for five, and a stylized shell or half-flower for zero. Larger numbers were built by stacking these signs vertically, with each row a higher power of twenty. The system, summarized in detail on the Maya number system and the concept of zero page, was the only fully positional number system in the pre-Columbian Americas and one of only a handful ever developed anywhere in human history.

The use of a true zero — a sign that meant “nothing in this column” and allowed place-value arithmetic to work — is treated separately in the article Did the Maya really invent the concept of zero?. Shell-glyph zeroes appear on monuments from at least 357 CE (Tres Zapotes Stela C) and become standard throughout the Classic period. The arithmetic of the Maya made it possible to manipulate dates across millions of years, a fact visible on monuments like Quirigua Stela E, whose Initial Series inscription of 9.16.4.0.0 13 bak’tun corresponds to a count past 1.5 billion days. The same monument contains the largest single number attested in Maya writing: a calendar-round value that requires 33 digits in base 20.

For astronomical and calendrical work, the Maya added a single but crucial modification to the otherwise pure base-20 system: a 360-day “tun” sub-unit (18 × 20 rather than 20 × 20), which kept the day-count aligned with the haab’ solar year. This “modified vigesimal” or “calendar-corrected” system is described alongside the practical use of the “C” and “D” multiplication prefixes that appear in the Dresden Codex eclipse and multiplication tables.

Astronomical observation and prediction

Maya astronomers observed the sky with naked-eye precision across the lowlands of present-day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and the Yucatan Peninsula, and across the highlands of Mexico. From a corpus of accumulated observations, they derived a set of mean-cycle tables for the planets, the Moon, and eclipses, and they stored those tables — with characteristic corrections and adjustments — in the Dresden Codex, one of four surviving Maya screenfold books.

The Venus table in the Dresden Codex records five synodic periods of the planet (each taken as 584 days) totalling 2,920 days, an interval that agrees with the modern synodic period of Venus (583.92 days) to within about 0.08 days per cycle. The Mars table uses a 780-day cycle that closely tracks the planet’s synodic period of 779.94 days. Lunar tables in the same codex tabulate 405 lunations (a 46-month, 11,960-day cycle) and the half-month of 11960 days that powers eclipse warning: any eclipse possible at the start of the cycle is possible, six months later, at its midpoint. The full mechanism is described in the page on Maya astronomy, with deeper treatment of the planet Venus in the article How did the Maya track Venus and its cycles?.

The Maya also recorded zenith-passage days — the twice-yearly moments when the Sun passed directly overhead and cast no shadow — and oriented many of their major buildings to capture them. The Caracol tower at Chichen Itza, the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, the E-Group complexes of the central lowlands, and the unique radial pyramid of Uaxactun all show alignments to sunrise or sunset on the solstices and equinoxes, to Venus extremes, and to the rising of particular stars.

How accurate were the predictions?

Measured against modern ephemerides, the Venus tables of the Dresden Codex carry an accumulated error of only a few hours per cycle; the lunar tables are accurate to within a day or so over a full 405-lunation span. Solar year observations, by contrast, drift by roughly one day every seven years because the true tropical year is about 365.2422 days and the Maya haab’ is exactly 365. The Dresden Codex therefore includes a series of correction cycles — the largest spanning 1,040 haab’ (1,040 × 365 = 379,600 days) — that re-synchronize the rounded calendar to the seasons. The detailed accuracy figures are tabulated in How accurate were Maya astronomical predictions?.

The 260-day and 365-day cycles and the Calendar Round

The same set of sky observations produced the two interlocking calendars that governed Maya ritual and civic life. The 260-day tzolk’in, a cycle of 20 day names multiplied by 13 numbers, was linked to the 365-day haab’, a vague solar year of 18 months of 20 days plus a closing month of 5 days. The pair locked together to form a Calendar Round of 18,980 unique days, after which any given day-name and number combination repeats. Both calendars are surveyed in the overview The Maya Calendar System and on its pages Maya astronomical cycles and observations. The arithmetic of the Long Count, by which Maya historians could fix any day across millions of years, is the bridge between pure numeration and the calendar.

The Long Count: a million-year calendar

The Long Count is the calendrical structure that made the arithmetic of the Maya useful for the historian and the astronomer. A Long Count date is read from the largest unit downward and is normally written in five positions: the baktun (144,000 days, or 20 katun), the katun (7,200 days, or 20 tun), the tun (360 days, or 18 uinal), the uinal (20 days, or 20 kin), and the kin (one day). A typical Classic period date, written bottom-up, is 9.16.4.0.0 13 bak’tun 16 katun 4 tun 0 uinal 0 kin, which corresponds to 19 February 764 CE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The bak’tun coefficient is normally given in a separate glyph prefixed to the date, because the same five-position count would otherwise have to be repeated for the piktun (20 baktun, 2,880,000 days) and beyond. The full treatment of the system is given on the page The Long Count and Calendar Round.

A handful of inscriptions reach beyond the baktun: the Quirigua Stela E, the Copan Stela J, the Quirigua Stela F, and a small number of Palenque inscriptions use the 13-baktun Pik period, the 20-baktun Piktun, and higher multiples to project dates forward by millions of years. The Quirigua Stela E contains the largest single number in the Maya corpus — a 33-digit vigesimal Period Number — and the same site contains inscriptions that project dates forward by 40 million years and more. The Long Count and its arithmetic are described in the page on Maya number system and the concept of zero.

The 819-day cycle and the four-planet count

The 819-day cycle is the most-discussed astronomical period of the Classic period. It is a common multiple of the synodic periods of the four planets the Maya tracked: 819 = 1 × 819 (the cycle itself), 2 × 409.5 (close to Jupiter at 398.88 days), 3 × 273 (close to Saturn at 378.09 days), 4 × 204.75 (close to a Mars-Venus average), 7 × 117 (close to Mercury at 115.88 days), 13 × 63 (a Saturn-Jupiter relation), and so on. The cycle was used to time the three k’atun-period-ending ceremonies of the Cross Group at Palenque and is referenced in a number of Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras inscriptions. The arithmetic of the 819-day cycle is described in the page on Maya number system and the concept of zero, and the place of the 819-day cycle in the Palenque dynastic program is treated in The art and court of Palenque.

The 819-day cycle has a further property: 819 days is, in a modified base-20 count, 1.0.9 in the tun-uinal-kin position. The cycle integrates the four planets and the 260-day tzolk’in on a 1,820-day, 7 × 260-day base, with a 7,280-day (28 × 260-day) double-cycle and a 40,950-day (50 × 819) full cycle that returns the system to the same configuration of the tzolk’in, the haab’, and the four planets. The cycle is, in effect, a small model of the larger Calendar Round, scaled up to four planets.

The four surviving codices

The four surviving Maya screenfold books are the most complete record of Maya astronomical and divinatory knowledge. The Dresden Codex, held in the Saxon State Library in Dresden, is the longest and most elaborate of the four, with 78 leaves of high-quality amate paper covered in black, red, blue, and yellow pigments. It contains the Venus tables (pp. 24, 46–50), the Mars tables (pp. 43–45), the lunar tables (pp. 51–58), the eclipse tables (pp. 51–58), the multiplication and correction tables (pp. 49–56), the almanacs of the agricultural year (pp. 9–23), and the divinatory almanacs of the ritual year (pp. 1–8, 25–28, 30–41). The Madrid Codex, held in the Museo de América in Madrid, contains a Venus table of its own, the almanacs of the agricultural year, and a number of ritual and divinatory almanacs. The Paris Codex, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, contains the almanacs of the ritual year and the astronomical tables. The Grolier Codex, the most recent of the four to be discovered (1971) and the most controversial, contains a Venus table and the almanacs of the haab’ year. The related page on Maya codices and surviving books describes the four books in more detail.

The codices were made from strips of amate paper, coated with a thin layer of fine lime plaster, and folded accordion-style into a long screenfold that could be read page by page. The paper was prepared from the inner bark of the wild fig tree (Ficus spp.) by a process of soaking, beating, and gluing that produced a tough, flexible writing surface. The pigments were mineral and organic: carbon black, hematite red, indigo blue, and a Maya blue made from indigo and palygorskite clay. The codices were the work of professional scribes, the aj tz’ib’, working in the workshops of the royal courts.

Eclipse prediction

The Maya system of eclipse prediction is the most mathematically sophisticated of the surviving tables. The basic tool is the 11,960-day, 405-lunation, 46-month eclipse cycle, an interval after which the same sequence of eclipse-possible dates repeats. The cycle integrates the synodic month of 29.53 days with the nodal month of 27.21 days on a 6-month base: any eclipse possible at the start of the cycle is possible, six months later, at its midpoint. The system is therefore a warning system, not a prediction system: the tables tell the observer that an eclipse is possible on a given day, and the observer uses visual observation to confirm.

The Dresden Codex eclipse tables occupy pages 51 to 58 and consist of a long series of 18-month, 11,960-day, and 46-month counts, with the tzolk’in and haab’ positions of each eclipse-possible day. The most discussed set of pages, the so-called “eclipse pages,” is a series of 18 columns of 5 entries each, with the 90 entries covering a span of 78 years from the start of the count. The same eclipse pages are used to identify a specific eclipse season, with the actual eclipse occurring on a date that the observer could narrow down by sighting the Moon’s position. The system is comparable in accuracy to the Greek Saros cycle and to the Chinese prediction system of the same period, and the details of the prediction mechanism are treated in Maya astronomical cycles and observations and in the article on Maya solar eclipse prediction.

Archaeoastronomy of the major sites

The architectural orientations of the major Maya sites are a rich record of the astronomical events that mattered to which community. The pages Maya astronomy, stars, planets, and eclipses lists the most important sites, and the Maya art, architecture, and monuments overview describes the buildings themselves in their architectural and iconographic context.

The Caracol tower at Chichen Itza is one of the best-studied observatories of the Maya area. A circular structure on two raised platforms, it has three doorways aligned to the west and three to the east, with the western doorways aligned to the sunset on the solstices and to the Venus extreme in the spring. The Caracol is dated to the tenth or eleventh century CE, after the Classic period, and it is a product of the Postclassic Maya of Yucatan.

The Cross Group at Palenque — the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross — is a three-temple complex built under K’inich Kan Bahlam II in the late seventh century CE. The temples are oriented to the rising of the Sun on the solstices and equinoxes, and the inscriptions of the Cross Group make reference to the 819-day cycle. The three temples are interpreted by David Kelley and Linda Schele as a representation of the three hearth-stones of creation, with the central temple representing the World Tree that unites the three.

The E-Group complexes of the central Peten lowlands, named for the type site of Uaxactun, are a more ancient class of observatory. An E-Group consists of a pyramid to the west of a long plaza, with three small temples on the pyramid’s southern face, and a fourth, long structure on the eastern side of the plaza. From the western pyramid, the Sun rises over the three small temples on the equinoxes and over the two outer temples on the solstices. Dozens of similar E-Groups are known across the Maya area, dating from the Middle and Late Preclassic. The complex at Uaxactun itself was built in the fourth century BCE and remained in use through the Late Classic.

The Temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza, the great pyramid with four faces and nine terraces, casts a serpent-shaped shadow at the equinox sunset. The shadow of the balustrade on the northern staircase undulates in a way that resembles a serpent’s body, and the serpent’s head, a stone sculpture at the base of the staircase, completes the image. The effect was deliberate; the building is a product of the tenth or eleventh century CE, and it reflects a careful astronomical-architectural program.

The Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, a natural sinkhole about 60 meters in diameter and 35 meters deep, was a focus of ritual activity in the Late Classic and Postclassic periods. The cenote was a place of pilgrimage and offering, and the offerings included jade, gold, pottery, and human remains. The astronomical significance of the cenote is not well established, but the orientation of the principal temple above the cenote is consistent with the alignment of other ritual structures in the area.

Mathematics in practice: tribute, captives, and offerings

The arithmetic of the Maya was used for the practical business of the city-state as well as for the ritual calendar. The inscriptions record counts of captives, of tribute in cacao beans and cotton blankets, of days worked, and of quantities of obsidian and jade. The stelae and altars of the Classic period record such counts in the Initial Series and in the supplementary text, and the data are an important source for the economic and political history of the Maya. The major site of Copan, for example, has left a rich record of dynastic and economic history in the inscriptions of the Hieroglyphic Stairway, the stelae of the Great Plaza, and the altars of the Acropolis. The same record is used in the Maya trade, markets, and economy page.

The bar-and-dot system was not the only way of writing large numbers. A typical tribute count might be written as a head-variant numeral followed by a coefficient, in the form of a small number next to a head representing the object counted. The same convention is used in the dedicatory inscriptions of Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras, where captives are typically identified by their home city and their personal name, with the count of captives in the head-variant numeral system.

The scholars and the decipherment

The modern understanding of Maya science is the work of a long line of scholars. The first great decipherer of the hieroglyphic script was the Russian-German epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, whose 1952 monograph on the script established the phonetic value of the Maya glyphs and laid the basis for the systematic reading of the inscriptions. Eric Thompson, the British-American Maya scholar, extended the decipherment through the 1950s and 1960s, and the modern school of epigraphers — David Kelley, Linda Schele, David Stuart, Stephen Houston, Marcello Canuto, and others — has produced a nearly complete reading of the script. The page on Maya writing, language, and books describes the history of the decipherment in more detail.

The mathematical and astronomical work has been advanced by specialists including Floyd Lounsbury, who clarified the workings of the 819-day cycle and the Venus tables; Anthony Aveni, who developed the field of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy; Harvey and Victoria Bricker, who advanced the reading of the eclipse tables; and John Linden, who worked on the Venus corrections. The work continues today at the universities of Texas, Yale, Harvard, Tulane, and Pennsylvania, and at the major Maya research institutions of Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The place of science in modern Maya identity

The science of the ancient Maya is an important element of the modern identity of the Maya communities of Mesoamerica. The living Maya communities of Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras have preserved many of the astronomical, calendrical, and medical traditions of their ancestors, and the recovery of the scientific knowledge of the Classic period has been an important part of the cultural-revival movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala, the Yucatec Maya of the lowlands, and the Q’eqchi’ Maya of the central lowlands all have active programs of cultural preservation that draw on the scientific traditions of the past. The page on the modern Maya identity and survival and the article on the Maya in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras describe the contemporary context.

The place of science in Maya society

Maya scientific knowledge was the property of a small, well-trained elite. Scribes, called aj tz’ib’ in Yucatec Maya, learned their art in palace schools and apprenticeship lines; healers (ah men) and priests (ah k’in) received parallel training that combined calendrics, divination, anatomy, and plant identification. The intellectual and political capital invested in this training is reflected in the Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system, in the dense Iconography of Maya painting and relief sculpture, and in the elaborate Maya pyramids, temples, and sacred architecture that embodied calendrical and astronomical alignments.

The Maya view of the cosmos was thoroughly integrated with their science. The movements of Venus, the cycle of eclipses, the passage of the Sun through the zenith — each was a signal of contact between the human, earthly plane and the world of gods and ancestors. The principal Maya gods and deities included patrons of the day-names and the planet Venus; Maya rituals of bloodletting and sacrifice were timed to the Calendar Round; the Maya priesthood and shamanism page describes how the same individuals who kept the almanacs also performed healing and divination.

Medicine, surgery, and the body

The empirical half of Maya medical practice was substantial. Healers identified at least 40 medicinal plants from ethnobotanical reconstructions and from the handful of texts such as the Badianus Manuscript of 1552 that record pre-conquest remedies. Among the most important were copal incense (Bursera spp.), pericón (Tagetes lucida), wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), the morning glory (Ipomoea spp.) used as a ritual purgative, the analgesic and deliriant datura (Datura stramonium and D. innoxia), and the bark of the guava and ramón trees. Healers also used animal products, minerals, and prayers. The full list and ritual context are given in Maya medicine, healers, and herbal remedies and in the article What plants did Maya healers use as medicine?.

Maya surgery was developed enough to be considered a distinct field. The most striking operation, trepanation of the skull, is documented in hundreds of skulls from sites as far apart as Chichen Itza, the highland Guatemalan site of Kaminaljuyu, and the central Peten lowlands. Mortality rates from the operation, judged by the proportion of skulls showing evidence of healing, ranged from roughly 50 to 80 percent, depending on the series. Healers also reset broken bones, treated tooth abscesses, and inlaid teeth with disks of jade, pyrite, hematite, and turquoise — a form of cosmetic dentistry that often required the removal of enamel and the careful fitting of a mineral cap. The technique is illustrated and discussed in What did Maya surgeons do for patients?.

Ritual surgery was equally important. Pul bloodletting specialists used obsidian lancets, stingray spines, and stingray-tail whips to draw small quantities of blood from the tongue, ears, genitals, and other sites. The blood was sometimes burned as paper was burned; the rising smoke was understood to feed gods and ancestors. The practice had both a religious and a medical aspect — relief from headaches, eye complaints, and fevers was often attributed to the operation. The political and religious dimensions are explored in Maya rituals of bloodletting and sacrifice.

What we know, and how we know it

Maya science is reconstructed from several kinds of evidence. Inscriptions on Maya stelae, altars, and stone monuments at sites such as Quirigua, Copan, Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Tikal record dates, durations, and astronomical statements in the full hieroglyphic script. The four surviving Maya books — the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices, summarized in The Maya codices and surviving books — preserve almanacs, multiplication tables, and eclipse warnings. Architectural orientations, plaster casts of vanished painted murals (most famously at Bonampak), and the surviving ceramic record all contribute. Ethnohistoric sources — the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán by Diego de Landa, the chronicles written in alphabetic Yucatec by indigenous authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the early colonial dictionaries — supply names, beliefs, and practices. Modern ethnobotany, archaeoastronomy, and isotopic analyses of human remains complete the picture.

What emerges is not a single coherent “Maya science” in the modern sense but a layered tradition in which a careful, empirical, and quantitative knowledge of the sky, the body, and the plant world sat alongside — and was often inseparable from — divination, ritual, and a four-cornered cosmological model. The result was a science that worked, and a worldview that explained why it worked.

The Lords of the Night and the cycle of nine

A distinctive feature of Classic period Maya calendrics is the Bolon Tz’akab or “many generations of the line of division” — the nine Lords of the Night who were held to rule the nine consecutive nights of the 9-day cycle. The cycle of nine was, like the 13-day cycle of the tzolk’in and the 20-day cycle of the uinal, a periodic count of 9, with each night identified by a glyph for one of the nine Lords. The nine-day cycle is recorded as the G-Series in the Supplementary Series of the Initial Series, alongside the Lunar Series, the 819-day count, and the 260-day tzolk’in position. The same cycle appears in the Dresden Codex and in the ritual almanacs of the Madrid Codex, where the nine Lords of the Night are invoked as patrons of the night sky.

The nine-day cycle, despite its 9 × 9 = 81-day and 9 × 260 = 2,340-day multiples, was not a primary astronomical cycle. It was, rather, a ritual-divinatory overlay on the basic 260-day tzolk’in, with each Lord of the Night associated with a particular day of the tzolk’in and a particular direction, color, and animal co-patron. The Lords were associated with the nine levels of the Maya underworld, Xibalba, and with the deities of the dead, and the cycle is described in the page on Xibalba, the Maya underworld.

The Year Bearers and the rotation of the haab’ month

The Year Bearer (yiho in Yucatec, yaax in the colonial dictionaries) is the tzolk’in day-name on which the first day of the haab’ year falls. Because the 365-day haab’ and the 260-day tzolk’in lock together to form an 18,980-day Calendar Round, the Year Bearer advances through the 20-day cycle of the tzolk’in in a regular 4-day rotation over a 52-haab’ Calendar Round. The four Year Bearers of the 52-year cycle are Ik’, Manik, Eb, and Kaban, the four days that start each of the four 13-year sub-cycles of the Calendar Round. The Year Bearer is recorded in the Supplementary Series of the Initial Series, where it appears as a glyph with a “carrier” suffix and a 1 to 13 coefficient.

The Year Bearer was important for the timing of ceremonies, the rotation of the ritual calendar, and the assignment of the new-year rites. The same 4-day rotation appears in the inscriptions of the Bonampak murals and in the dedicatory inscriptions of the Cross Group at Palenque. The Year Bearer of Tikal in the Late Classic period is Ik’ (wind), the Year Bearer of Copan is Kaban (earth), and the Year Bearer of the Palenque dynasty is Kaban (earth).

The four cardinal directions and the four-painted-page convention

The four cardinal directions, the four colors, the four elements, and the four trees of the world were the basic grid of the Maya cosmos. The directions are east (red, chak), north (white, sak), west (black, ek’), and south (yellow, kan); the colors are the corresponding cardinal-point colors, the trees are the yax che’il kab’ (the green ceiba tree of the world center), the chac che’ (the red tree of the east), the sak che’ (the white tree of the north), the ek’ che’ (the black tree of the west), and the kan che’ (the yellow tree of the south); the birds are the k’uk’ (quetzal), the sac bu’ul (white owl), the k’in (sun), the mukuy (vulture); and the patrons are the four ch’ul ahau (holy lords) of the four directions. The four-painted-page convention of the Dresden Codex — the practice of painting one of four colors on each page of the codex — encodes the same four-pole system, and the same convention appears in the almanacs of the Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices. The cosmological grid is described in Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology and in the page on Principal Maya gods and deities.

The cardinal-point grid was integrated into Maya science. The four-cornered cosmos was the spatial frame within which the calendar, the almanacs, the buildings, and the almanacs were organized, and the integration of space and time is one of the most distinctive features of Maya intellectual life. The related page on Maya astronomy, stars, planets, and eclipses describes the celestial counterpart of the four-cornered model, and the article on How did Maya temples align with the stars? gives a treatment of the architectural orientation.

The Pleiades, the dark-rift, and the Milky Way

The Maya observed the stars and the Milky Way with the same care they gave to the planets. The Pleiades, a cluster of stars in Taurus visible in the pre-dawn sky in late April and early May, were identified as a single asterism called Motz or Tzon tzec, sometimes translated as “the first constellation” or “the first stars.” The first appearance of the Pleiades in the pre-dawn sky, called the heliacal rising, was a marker of the beginning of the rainy season and the start of the agricultural year. The Pleiades are depicted in the Bonampak murals and are referenced in the inscriptions of the Classic period.

The dark-rift in the Milky Way, a long, dark band of dust and gas visible to the naked eye as a dark stripe running through the bright band of the Milky Way in the southern sky, was identified with the road to Xibalba, the underworld. The dark-rift is visible from the Maya lowlands in the southern sky in the summer months, and it is depicted in the inscriptions and the codices as the Wakah-Chan (the “raised-up sky” or the “upended tree of the world”). The dark-rift’s first appearance in the evening sky in late July marked the beginning of the dry season, and its disappearance marked the beginning of the rains.

The Milky Way itself, the bright band of the galaxy visible to the naked eye in the summer and winter months, was identified with the celestial river along which the sun travelled at night. The Milky Way passes through the zenith at the latitude of the central Maya lowlands (about 17 degrees north), and the zenith-passage of the Milky Way is recorded in the inscriptions of the Classic period. The Milky Way and the dark-rift are described in the page on Maya astronomy, stars, planets, and eclipses and in the article on How did Maya temples align with the stars?.

The cult of the Sun and the Sun-observation temple

The cult of the Sun, identified with the principal deity K’inich Ahau (the Sun-faced Lord), was one of the principal cults of the Classic period. The Sun was associated with the color red, the east, the cardinal direction of the rising Sun, the young Maize God, and the planet Jupiter. The cult is recorded in the inscriptions and codices, and the principal Sun-observation temples are described in the page on Maya pyramids, temples, and sacred architecture.

The Temple of the Sun at Palenque, part of the Cross Group, is one of the principal Sun-observation temples of the Maya. The temple is oriented to the rising of the Sun on the winter solstice, and the inscriptions of the temple record the dedication of the building in 692 CE under K’inich Kan Bahlam II. The temple’s iconography is dominated by solar symbols: a glyph for K’inich (the Sun-faced Lord), a representation of the Sun in the form of a four-petaled flower, and a personification of the summer solstice Sun as a young warrior. The temple is described in The art and court of Palenque and in Why is the Temple of the Inscriptions so important?.

The Cave of the Sun at Chichen Itza, a natural cave at the base of the great cenote, was a focus of the cult of the Sun in the Late Classic and Postclassic periods. The cave was understood to be the entrance to Xibalba, the underworld, and the cult of the Sun involved a ritual procession into the cave at the time of the zenith passage of the Sun. The practice is described in the page on Xibalba, the Maya underworld and in the article on Maya rituals of bloodletting and sacrifice.

Modern ethnobotany and the living pharmacopoeia

The plants of the pre-conquest Maya pharmacopoeia are still in use among the highland Maya communities of Chiapas, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The ethnobotanical research of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has identified some 4,000 species of medicinal plants in use among the modern Maya of Mesoamerica, of which a substantial proportion is also recorded in the colonial sources. The plants described in Maya medicine, healers, and herbal remedies and in What plants did Maya healers use as medicine? are all in current use, often in the same combinations and at the same doses as the colonial and pre-conquest sources record.

The continuity of the practice is a point of cultural pride for the modern Maya, and the recovery of the pre-conquest pharmacopoeia has been an important part of the cultural-revival movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The curandero tradition of the highland Maya is a direct descendant of the ah men tradition of the pre-conquest period, and the diagnostic categories of “hot-cold,” “fright,” and “lost soul” are still in use. The page on The living Maya: heritage and modern descendants describes the modern context in more detail.

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