Unlike the ancient Greeks, for whom all knowledge could be categorized according to a tripartite classification – the phenomenon itself, its place in time (history), and its place in space (geography) – the civilizations of pre‐Columbian Mesoamerica viewed all knowledge as religion, some aspects of which found their reflection both in time and space. The most original intellectual creation to emanate from Mesoamerica was the 260‐day sacred almanac, known variously as the tzolkin among the Maya and as the tonalpohualli among the Aztecs. Pre‐dating the 365‐day secular calendar, which these people also developed, it ran concurrently with the latter to produce a never‐ending series of 52‐year cycles (365 × 52 = 260 × 73 = 18,980 days), giving rise to the Mesoamerican belief that history repeated itself every 52 years.
Though the origin of the 260‐day calendar has long been debated, the most convincing explanation for its astronomic underpinnings was first given by Zelia Nuttall in 1928,...
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Malmström, V.H. (2008). Geography in Mesoamerica. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8610
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