Newly found Mayan records of astronomical phenomena in Dresden Codex

Abstract

The rich culture of old Maya gave birth to a very complicated and complex calendar; they also recorded important historical events and many significant astronomical phenomena. The main source of information is represented by Dresden Codex (DC), one of the four preserved Mayan hieroglyphic literal legacies. DC roughly covers the interval between 280 and 1325 AD. The old problem of precise Mayan dating with respect to our calendar is traditionally called correlation; it expresses the difference in days between the Long Count of the Mayan calendar and the Julian Date, used in presentday astronomy. There exist more than fifty published correlations that differ one from the other by as much as several centuries. Historians mostly accept the so called Goodman-Mart?nez-Thompson (GMT) value of 584 283 days, which is based mostly on historical events extracted from the sources of a postclassical period of Mayan history. On the contrary, brothers B?hm used precisely dated astronomical data from classical period to derive the B?hm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days. Unlike the GMT correlation it is in excellent agreement with the astronomical phenomena recorded in DC. Since then we published several papers supporting the validity of BB correlation and its advantage over GMT in the classical period of Mayan history. To this end, we used more records of astronomical phenomena discovered in DC. This study describes six records of planetary conjunctions that we found recently on p. 37 of DC that concern planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of these records coincide with the real occurrences of these phenomena within several days, if BB correlation is applied.