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Day 15 The Dusty Road to Seibal (continued)
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Day 16 Flores and Lake Petén Itzá

Into Guatemala 1989 [Part 9 of 11 Parts]

Jo
2004-03-05 23:07:54

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Here are some more pictures of the ruins in Seibal.

The circular structure is somewhat fancifully called the "Temple of the Jaguar" by archaeologists. What scenes and sacrifices of barbaric splendor must have taken place here!

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Considering their inhospitable environment and isolation from the cultural centers of the Old World, the intellectual achievements of the ancient Maya are truly astonishing. The positional system of numeration with the number zero was invented by only two civilizations in history: the Maya, and the Hindu, from which the Arabs learned the mathematics that they were eventually to transmit to Europe. The Maya employed the vigesimal system and counted in groups of twenty, whereas nowadays we use the decimal system and count in groups of ten. (In contrast, the classical Greeks and Romans struggled with an arithmetic so cumbersome that only very bright people could multiply, say, two-digit numbers.)

Using this powerful conceptual tool, the Maya contemplated time periods of geologic scope-- in the billions of years. They developed a calendar and a tradition of observational astronomy unsurpassed until modern times. Their calendar, which was more exact than the Gregorian one commonly used today, made possible not only a highly efficient agricultural cycle of sowing and reaping, but also impressive predictions of astronomical events, e.g., eclipses, that enhanced the prestige of the priest-kings who announced them.

The Maya's monumental architecture could not have been realized without a good grasp of applied geometry. There is strong evidence that the ancient Maya knew of the 3-4-5 right triangle-- a triangle with sides of length 3, 4, and 5 must have a right angle. Indeed, some structures in Tikal were built as the third vertex of such a triangle to honor ...