 Greetings and welcome to the introduction to astronomy. In this week's astronomy of other cultures we are going to talk about Maya astronomy and look specifically at some of the codices that have been left behind by the Mayans to tell us a little bit more about what they understood of the sky. So what are the codices? Well they are books left behind by the Mayan civilization. They are written in a hieroglyphic script and you can see some of that in the image here from one of these. They go back between 500 and a thousand years. So going back to depending the 11th, 12th century for some of the very older ones and coming into the 1500s by the most current ones and in fact they were still being used and added to by the time the Spanish arrived. Now unfortunately many of these were destroyed by Catholic priests in the 1500s. So at this point only four of them are known to survive. So we can take a brief look at those four. So first let's look at the Dresden Codex here and we see that's the image we're looking at first. And we find that it is an almanac. It has things like tables of eclipses and periods of Mars and Venus. So looking at these two planets and we know that Venus was a very important to the Maya civilization. So we can see portions of that here and we're looking at one small part of the entire Codex. The Dresden Codex is one of the larger ones that survive and has a lot more information in it. Specifically astronomical information compared to some of the others. And then we have the Madrid Codex. Which also again is stretched out here as we see it. A very long section here and then divided into individual pages and could be folded up. It also is an almanac of sorts and also ties into astrology and horoscopes. So predictions that would be made based on the positioning of objects in the sky. So not only were astronomy and astrology tied together for very early periods of Western astronomy but they also were in the Maya civilization. And then we have the Paris Codex. What we see here, the Paris Codex was actually damaged. You can see a lot of portions of it are actually destroyed here around the edges. It was apparently not cared for very well early on and found almost discarded. And then since saved. So we still have some of that here, at least some portions of it. This actually contains again tying into the astrology containing prophecies and the Maya zodiac. And then finally the most recent discovery of these is the Maya Codex of Mexico. This is the only one that exists in the Americas that is still there. It was discovered in 1965. It has less detail than the other three codices that survive. But is again another glimpse into that early Maya civilization and what they understood about the stars. So let's go ahead and summarize a little bit here. And what we've looked at is that these Maya codices gave us a glimpse into the Maya civilization. Most of these were destroyed by a Catholic priest during the Spanish invasion of the New World. And only four of them are left surviving today. And there were many more of these. So we're only getting a small glimpse of what the Maya understood. We don't know. It's based on another civilization. On any other four books, if that's all that survives, it's really not giving you a complete picture. But we can see that they were used as things like almanacs and also for horoscopes and predictions and in terms of timings for various religious ceremonies. So that concludes this lecture on the Maya codices. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then, have a great day everyone, and I will see you in class.