A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has identified a Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name for the first time, piecing together a complex astronomical formula carved into a building wall roughly 1,200 years ago.
The name decoded from the wall is Sak Tahn Waax, which translates to White-chested Fox. According to a report by New Scientist, this is also the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician ever known from anywhere in the Americas. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.
The inscriptions were found at the Classic Maya site of Xultun in Guatemala, where excavations began in 2010. Inside a small masonry building, researchers found more than 50 mathematical and astronomical microtexts covering the east and north-east walls. Scientists believe these were rough drafts made by Maya mathematicians as they tracked and predicted the movements of celestial objects.
Lead author Franco D. Rossi and his colleagues focused on one mural called Text 19. To reconstruct it, they produced scale drawings, photographs, and scans of the imagery, then digitally enhanced the results. The text consists of 11 hieroglyphs that had to be examined under different illumination angles and compared to later astronomical and mathematical writings before their meaning could be worked out.
"While artists' and sculptors' signatures for painted ceramic vessels and carved monuments have been identified, the scholars behind computational timekeeping have remained anonymous," says Rossi.
The formula in Text 19 draws on several calendar systems. It connects a 260-day ritual calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day approximation of Venus's synodic cycle, and a 780-day approximation of Mars's synodic cycle. The total span of the formula equals five Venus synodic cycles, or 2,920 days. The date the text most likely refers to is November 7, AD 781 in the Julian calendar.
Co-author David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin described the scope of the math involved. "The math involves his unique understanding of connections and patterns between several cycles of time, including the 260-day ritual day-count, the solar year, as well as the cycles of Venus and Mars," he says.
Whether the name Sak Tahn Waax represents the scribe signing his own work or crediting another mathematician is not certain. Rossi addressed that directly. "Whether this is an instance of the scribe himself signing his own calculation or attributing the intellectual work to another, we have a formula and the name of its creator, which serves to demonstrate the importance of this kind of intellectual contribution for Classic Maya people," he says.
The formula's exact application also remains unclear. Rossi says it "isn't incorporated into any larger body of work." He believes it was meant to show the relationship between Venus, Mars, and human counts of time in ways that could then be used for political ceremony, predictive astronomy, and understanding seasonality.
Co-author Heather Hurst, director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project, placed the discovery in broader context. "These 'rough draft' calculations and tables are akin to finding an early version of a well-known manuscript, or a sketch of a great artwork," she says. "This fills out an important dimension of Classic Maya life that had typically been reconstructed through ethnohistories and Spanish accounts written centuries later."
The Maya civilization flourished in Central America from roughly 2000 BC to AD 1697. Much of their mathematical and astronomical knowledge was lost after Spanish missionaries burned their books following colonization. The inscriptions at Xultun represent a rare surviving window into how Maya intellectuals actually worked through complex calculations, and Sak Tahn Waax is now the only known individual Classic Maya mathematician whose name has been connected to a specific piece of work.
The research team's next steps were not announced as of publication.
