Mayan mathematics

Hernan Cortes, excited by stories of the lands which Columbus had recently discovered, sailed from Spain in 1505 landing in Hispaniola which is now Santo Domingo. After farming there for some years he sailed with Velazquez to conquer Cuba in 1511. He was twice elected major of Santiago then, on 18 February 1519, he sailed for the coast of Yucatan with a force of 11 ships, 508 soldiers, 100 sailors, and 16 horses. He landed at Tabasco on the northern coast of the Yucatan peninsular. He met with little resistance from the local population and they presented him with presents including twenty girls. He married Malinche, one of these girls.

The people of the Yucatan peninsular were descendants of the ancient Mayan civilisation which had been in decline from about 900 AD. It is the mathematical achievements of this civilisation which we are concerned with in this article. However, before describing these, we should note that Cortes went on to conquer the Aztec peoples of Mexico. He captured Tenochtitlan before the end of 1519 (the city was rebuilt as Mexico City in 1521) and the Aztec empire fell to Cortes before the end of 1521. Malinche, who acted as interpreter for Cortes, played an important role in his ventures.

In order to understand how knowledge of the Mayan people has reached us we must consider another Spanish character in this story, namely Diego de Landa. He joined the Franciscan Order in 1541 when about 17 years old and requested that he be sent to the New World as a missionary. Landa helped the Mayan peoples in the Yucatan peninsular and generally tried his best to protect them from their new Spanish masters. He visited the ruins of the great cities of the Mayan civilisation and learnt from the people about their customs and history.

However, despite being sympathetic to the Mayan people, Landa abhorred their religious practices. To the devote Christian that Landa was, the Mayan religion with its icons and the Mayan texts written in hieroglyphics appeared like the work of the devil. He ordered all Mayan idols be destroyed and all Mayan books be burned. Landa seems to have been surprised at the distress this caused the Mayans.

Nobody can quite understand Landa's feelings but perhaps he regretted his actions or perhaps he tried to justify them. Certainly what he then did was to write a book Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (1566) which describes the hieroglyphics, customs, temples, religious practices and history of the Mayans which his own actions had done so much to eradicate. The book was lost for many years but rediscovered in Madrid three hundred years later in 1869.

A small number of Mayan documents survived destruction by Landa. The most important are: the Dresden Codex now kept in the Sachsische Landesbibliothek Dresden; the Madrid Codex now kept in the American Museum in Madrid; and the Paris Codex now in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. The Dresden Codex is a treatise on astronomy, thought to have been copied in the eleventh century AD from an original document dating from the seventh or eighth centuries AD.