The Order of Days by David Stuart

Author:David Stuart [Stuart, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-72081-8
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Two Pages of the Dresden Codex, a sacred Maya book probably recovered by an early Spanish expedition near Cozumel in the early sixteenth century.

It was Förstemann, without any knowledge of Maya culture or language, who first decoded the system and realized how it worked. When he started, one important source he had at hand was Bishop Landa’s sixteenth-century treatise Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, which he used as a valuable guide for identifying a number of the day and month signs in the Dresden Codex. With that he was quickly able to recognize some Calendar Round dates. He noticed as well how, in a number of pages, Calendar Round records routinely followed the strings of five numbers, each written with bars and dots and never totaling more than nineteen. These, Förstemann reckoned, must be a different sort of calendar system, using a format of place notation to record a quantity of elapsed time from a certain base date far in the past. He also was able to see that some of these same units could be used to write elapsed time between different days in the almanacs of the Dresden Codex and other manuscripts. Gradually he built up a largely mathematical “proof” for a new system, and by 1890 he had worked out all of the basic components of the calendar, now called the Long Count.

At around the same time, across the Atlantic, an American by the name of Joseph T. Goodman was working on many of the same questions that had occupied Förstemann. Like his German counterpart, Goodman did not come from a conventional academic setting; his background was in the newspaper business. He started out in San Francisco before the Civil War and eventually moved to Virginia City, Nevada, where he was owner and editor of the Territorial Enterprise. It was there that he gave the young Samuel Clemens his first job as a writer, which established a lifelong friendship between the two. In later life Goodman sold his part of the newspaper and made money in the local mining business, which allowed him to dabble in archaeology. By the 1880s a number of important publications on the Maya were just coming out, none more important than the works of the British explorer Alfred P. Maudslay, who was documenting the ruins and sculptures of Copan. Maudslay’s photographs and the meticulous and accurate drawings he published of inscriptions there finally made the study of Maya glyphs possible. Through mutual contacts, Goodman corresponded with Maudslay, and the two men soon collaborated, with Goodman given the task of publishing the first overview of the “archaic Maya inscriptions.” Whereas Förstemann had used the Dresden Codex and other manuscripts in his studies, Goodman mostly focused on the texts of Copan, Quiriguá, and Palenque. Working somewhat independently—it’s hard to say how much of Förstemann’s work he read—Goodman seems to have reached some of the same conclusions about the Long Count, and identified many of the glyphs for the numbers of the Long Count’s units, or periods.

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