Seasonal Implications of Maya Eclipse and Rain Iconography in the Dresden Codex

Fray Bernadino de Sahagún , Florentine Codex, General history of the things of New Spain, Book 7 — The sun, moon, and stars, and the binding of the years, ed. and transl. by Anderson J. O. Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, 1953; hereafter Florentine Codex ), 2.

Florentine Codex , 8–9.

Susan Milbrath , Star gods of the Maya: Astronomy in art, folklore, and calendars (Austin, 1999), 111–17.

Anthony F. Aveni Edward E. Calnek , “Astronomical considerations in the Aztec expression of history: Eclipse data”, Ancient Mesoamerica , x (1999), 87–98.

Martin Meinshausen , “Über Sonnen- und Mondfinsternisse in der Dresdener Mayahandschrift”, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie , no. 45 (1913), 221–7; Harvey M. Bricker Victoria R. Bricker , “Classic Maya prediction of solar eclipses”, Current anthropology , xxiv (1983), 1–24.

Victoria R. Bricker Harvey M. Bricker , “The seasonal table in the Dresden Codex and related almanacs”, Archaeoastronomy , no. 19 (1994), S1–62, p. S4.

The historical paradigm of Maya codex research has been presented in numerous publications; see Bricker Bricker , op. cit. (ref. 6); Victoria R. Bricker Harvey M. Bricker , “Archaeoastronomical implications of an agricultural almanac in the Dresden Codex”, Mexicon , viii (1986), 29–35; Victoria R. Bricker Harvey M. Bricker , “A method for cross-dating almanacs in the Dresden Codex”, in Anthony F. Aveni (ed.), The sky in Mayan literature (New York, 1992), 43–86; Harvey M. Bricker Victoria R. Bricker Bettina Wulfing , “Determining the historicity of three almanacs in the Madrid Codex”, Archaeoastronomy , no. 22 (1997), S17–36.

For a detailed discussion of the climatology of the Maya region, see Richardson B. Gill , The great Maya droughts: Water, life, and death (Albuquerque, 2000).

Anthony F. Aveni , Skywatchers of ancient Mexico (Austin, 1980), 79.

See ref. 7.

A more detailed explanation of how these dates are reached may be found in Bricker Bricker , op. cit. (ref. 6), S48–49. In that study, the Brickers attempt to demonstrate the function of the Dresden Seasonal Table to commensurate the Maya haab (365-day year) with tropical year stations and eclipse seasons, presenting the multiple that allows the closest correspondence to tropical year stations for each stated base date. For the present purposes, however, I present the relevant eclipse seasons using the original base date of the table without considering which multiple best fits the tropical year stations (Table 1).

Bricker Bricker , op. cit. (ref. 7).

Bricker V. , personal communication, 2001. For Schele Grube's alternative interpretation of the Dresden Codex ‘flood scene’, see Linda Schele Nikolai Grube , The proceedings of the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop: The Dresden Codex , transcribed and ed. by Phil Wanyerka (Austin, 1997), 166.

Harvey M. Bricker Victoria R. Bricker , “More on the Mars Table in the Dresden Codex”, Latin American antiquity , viii (1997), 384–97.

See Table 5 in Bricker Bricker Wulfing , op. cit. (ref. 7), S33.

The Madrid Codex has been the object of much scholarly attention recently, and the growing body of literature regarding this document should contribute to a better understanding of the various traditions of ancient Maya astronomy and indigenous concepts of climatology. See Victoria R. Bricker Gabrielle Vail , (eds), Papers on the Madrid Codex (Middle American Research Institute Publication 64; New Orleans, 1997); Gabrielle Vail Anthony F. Aveni (eds), The Madrid Codex: New approaches to understanding an ancient Maya document (Boulder, in press).

David C. Lindberg , The beginnings of Western science: The European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago, 1992), 26–27. Lindberg states that the pre-Socratic explanations of eclipses were qualitatively different in that “eclipses do not reflect personal whim or the arbitrary fancies of the gods”, but the natures of things in an orderly, predictable cosmos. This seems a useful distinction to apply to Maya and Aztec cases in this context, even if Lindberg's concomitant assertions of a Greek distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” and the importance of alphabetic writing are not applicable to the development of Mesoamerican civilizations.