Hieroglyphs Inscribed on Wall of Ancient Building Reveal Name of Mayan Astronomer for the First Time

Archaeologists excavating Xultun, a large Mayan site in northeast Guatemala, have identified the name of an 8th-century Mayan astronomer-mathematician who wrote a calendrical formula on an interior wall of a small masonry building.

The individual’s name, Sak Tahn Waax, translates to “White-chested Fox,” and the formula (either written by him, or by someone else and attributed to him) calculates the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus. According to a paper published by Antiquity, this is the first and only known example of a Maya mathematician being directly credited for his or her intellectual work.

The structure where the formula and signature were found was first excavated in 2010. In addition to hieroglyph texts, the interior walls feature murals depicting portraits of seated and kneeling figures, and archaeological evidence of papermaking tools. Researchers believe that the chamber was used for mentorship and training, and to teach calendrical calculations during the 8th century CE, before being filled in around the end of the century, eventually becoming the foundation for a new building.

In order to decipher the formula, a team of archaeologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Skidmore College, and the University of Texas at Austin, studied high-resolution scans and multispectral images of the thousand-year-old texts, which they then compared to accepted translations of Classic period Maya glyphic texts.

Franco Rossi, the project’s lead researcher, expressed surprise that there aren’t existing records of signed mathematical calculation. “This kind of specialised work, he told the Art Newspaper “was both important and widespread within ancestral Maya society, particularly during the eighth century.”