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.New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.This book is aimed at general readers and lays out the basics well.It is also pri-marily a book about psychological responses to color, with chapters on suchsubjects as  To Heal the Body and  To Calm the Mind.Lauber, Patricia, with photographs by Jerome Wexler and Leonard Lessin.WhatDo You See and How Do You See It? New York: Crown, 1994.Parents might liketo sneak a look at this book for  young readers. It manages to get across a lotof information clearly and without too much oversimplification, and it describesoptical experiments that kids can try for themselves.Sinclair, Sandra.Extraordinary Eyes.New York: Dial, 1992.This is another excel-lent book for young readers.Note: Vision is such a technical subject that the best recourse for the generalreader may be articles in magazines, and not just science magazines.One of themost interesting articles on vision in recent years appeared in The Economist,April 3 9, 1999.Titled  The Biology of Art, and written by the editors, it dis-cusses how various schools of art, from impressionism to cubism to the mobilesof Alexander Calder, draw on and play with specific biological aspects of humanvision.At this writing, it was available on the Internet at britannica.com.c13.qxd 6/19/01 2:25 PM Page 131Chapter13How Did MayanAstronomers KnowSo Much?hen the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortésfirst marched on the Aztec capital of Tenochti-Wtlán (now Mexico City) in 1518, neither he norhis men seemed to have any appreciation of the sophistication ofthe culture to which they would soon lay waste.The Spanishnoted with disdain that despite the Aztecs grand architecture andthe gold that adorned their leaders, these New World  Indiansdidn t even have wheeled vehicles.Nor were later explorers andgovernors much impressed with the remnants of the older Mayanculture that survived in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula.Some Roman Catholic priests did understand something of whatthey were seeing, and a few were sympathetic, but the mostimportant Spanish administrator in the Yucatán during this periodwas a Franciscan friar named Diego de Landa, who had beenschooled by the Inquisition.He was determined to stamp out theMayan religion, not only destroying representations of the Mayangods, but also burning a large depository of ancient hieroglyphicmanuscripts.Ironically, de Landa was as fascinated by the Mayanculture as he was determined to destroy it, and he made copious131c13.qxd 6/19/01 2:25 PM Page 132132 UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF SCIENCEnotes, which he later used to write a treatise on the Maya in the1560s.A copy of that treatise, with some sections missing, wasrediscovered in Madrid 300 years later, in 1863.It served as thekey to deciphering the three undisputed ancient codices of theMaya that had survived despite de Landa s slash-and-burn tactics.The most important of these manuscripts is the DresdenCodex discovered in Vienna in 1739.It is assumed that it hadoriginally been brought back from the Yucatán as a kind of sou-venir.None of the fully authenticated surviving codices dealswith Mayan history a loss that haunts scholars to this daybut the Dresden Codex reveals the astonishing degree of astro-nomical knowledge among the Maya, while the Codex Tro-Cortesianus focuses on ritual and prophecy, and the Codex Pere-sianus details ceremonies connected to the extremely complexMayan calendar.It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that themeanings of these codices began to be unraveled by variousscholars around the world, particularly Léon de Rosnay of France,Cyrus Thomas of the United States, German philologist ErnstFöstermann, and ultimately, in 1897, a California newspaper edi-tor named Joseph T.Goodman, who borrowed liberally from theGerman s work without giving credit.Goodman made up for thislapse in 1905 by working out the correlations between the Mayanand Christian calendars, an achievement of importance to Mayanstudies ever since.It became apparent that the planet Venus was of vast signifi-cance to the Maya, and essential to the structure of their complexcalendar.The primacy of Venus is not in itself surprising.As thebrightest object in the night sky, aside from the Moon, the  eve-ning star had been the focus of religious observances in numer-ous ancient societies, starting with the Sumerians, as early as3000 b.c.Although several cultures had used Venus as a kind oflodestar, none had approached the accuracy of observations ofthis planet achieved by the Maya.During what is called the Clas-sic period of Mayan civilization (a designation intended to evokeassociations with classical Greece), from A.D [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]