knowledge of this last correction by the Maya is without doubt one of the most outstanding discoveries of ancient astronomy." (Esperanza Carrasco Licea y Alberto Carramiñana Alonso)[1]
While considering time as an abstraction resulting from measurement of movement and that it was circular and thus cyclic, the ancient grandparents could "avoid" the linear view of time and therefore could "scrutinize" the past and the future, something the Western civilization has never been able to do. However, there is a date found by archaeologists in linear time, going back beyond the year 1500 BCE, in which specialists assign the emergence of the Olmec culture. This date assignment paradoxically is Maya:
"A third type of time register was known as the long count. This time computation began in the formative period, somewhere in the Tehuantepec isthmus, and was perfected by the Maya during the classical era (300-900 CE). The long count registered the number of days from a mythological starting-point, an imaginary beginning of time that the Mayans placed in year 3114 BCE." (Enrique Florescano. 1987)
The time for ancient grandparents was something very different than time for Europeans. In the same way that it is today, for indigenous people and peasants, in relation to urban people. This philosophical perception of time makes us somehow different, as time grows and shortens, and even ceases to exist. The cyclic time, sacred, family, and social, for Mexicans has a philosophical, sacred and festive sense.
"The Mayan priests computed in their steles "Suns Veintenas" that went back hundreds of millions of years into the past and also provided future cycles. If the day is for them a solar presence, time is an endless succession of all cycles of the Sun". (Miguel Leon Portilla. 1968)
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- ↑ Dr. Alberto Carramiñana Alonso is Astrophysics area coordinator at The National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (in Spanish: Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, INAOE) is a Mexican science research institute located in Tonantzintla, Puebla. Website http://www.inaoep.mx
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