Time Line of Decipherment
1880
Math
and astronomy
As
with many early glyph-related discoveries, serendipity may have played a role
in the next major step in decipherment. A librarian with a penchant for
mathematics named Ernst Förstemann just happened to work at the Royal Library
in Dresden, Germany, which owned the Dresden Codex and after which it was
named. He also had access to Landa's "Relation." Using his
unique skill set, Förstemann decoded the astronomy tables the Maya used to
determine when, for example, to wage war (above are codex pages
depicting the planetary cycle of Venus). He also deciphered the Maya system for
measuring time, now called the Calendar Round. In this system, dates cycle once
every 52 years, much like dates cycle annually in our Gregorian calendar. Later
Mayanists used Förstemann's discoveries to convert Maya dates to
Gregorian dates—for instance, the Maya believed the world was created on
August 13, 3114 B.C.