AHEAD OF THEIR TIME

The Maya civilisation is known for its art and architecture.

- GEORGIA TORBET

But as we decipher their surviving cultural relics, we're discovering Maya astronomy was even more advanced than we had imagined

Maya artefacts are something you'd probably expect to find in an archaeological site in Mexico or hidden in ruins buried deep in the Central American jungle. A startling number of them turn up in Europe, however - a legacy of the pillaging carried out by Spanish Conquistadors during the early 16th century.

In 1744, one such artefact found its way to Germany, and was catalogued into a collection in Dresden’s Royal Library. It remains there to this day.

The artefact is believed to be almost 1,000 years old and, in a sense, a library is the most logical place for it. That’s because, to all intents and purposes, it’s a book. One of the oldest surviving books from the Americas.

Its age and provenance, while profound, aren’t what make it amazing, though.

What makes it amazing is that parts of the book contain remarkably detailed observations of astronomical phenomena. So detailed, in fact, that it could have been used to predict eclipses across the entire globe.

The book has become known as the Dresden Codex. And as scientists gradually decode the information held within its pages, they're unlocking the secrets of the Maya civilisation.

ACCURATE PREDICTIONS

The Dresden Codex isn’t like a book in the modern sense, with covers and pages bound together along one edge. It’s more like an accordion, with pages arranged next to each other, but capable of being folded back on themselves so that the page you want is at the top.

Some of the pages are damaged, and many that remain are concerned with ritual and ceremony. Codices, like the Dresden Codex, were essentially instruction pamphlets and would have been used “as a tool for ritual, rather than narrative,” Dr Justin Lowry, an archaeologist at New York State University, who has studied the Codex, explains.