Maya Astronomer Sak Tahn Waax Identified in Ancient Mural
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- Franco Rossi at MIT and colleagues identified Sak Tahn Waax — translating to White-chested Fox — from Text 19, an 11-hieroglyph mural at Xultun, Guatemala, believed to be the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name.
- Sak Tahn Waax is also the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician from anywhere in the Americas, according to Rossi.
- Text 19 incorporates a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day Venus synodic cycle, and a 780-day Mars synodic cycle, totaling 2,920 days across five Venus cycles and most likely referring to 7 November AD 781 in the Julian calendar.
- The formula is one of approximately 50 "rough draft" astronomical and mathematical texts on the east and north-east walls of a small masonry building at Xultun, where excavations have been underway since 2010.
- Researchers believe Sak Tahn Waax was probably male, and the inscription may represent the scribe signing his own calculation or attributing the intellectual work to another.
- How the formula was applied is unknown, since it "isn't incorporated into any larger body of work," though Rossi suggests it could relate to political ceremony, predictive astronomy, or understandings of seasonality.
Why it matters: The identification gives scholars of Mesoamerican astronomy a named author for an otherwise anonymous tradition and the oldest known astronomer-mathematician in the Americas — reframing Classic Maya intellectual contributions as attributable to individuals rather than a faceless collective, after Spanish missionaries destroyed most Maya codices and erased direct knowledge of who produced this work.
