Xultun's Astronomical Texts: New Interpretations Related to Planetary Motions Susan Milbrath 2025, Mexicon

https://www.academia.edu/175276513/Xultuns_Astronomical_Texts_New_Interpretations_Related_to_Planetary_Motions?email_work_card=title Texts in Los Sabios (Structure 10K-2) at Xultun, Guatemala, record calendar inscriptions of great relevance to ancient Maya astronomy. The structure incorporates calculations related to astronomy, and the accompanying murals represent a ruler and attendants, all of whom bear obsidian titles. The ruler himself is disguised as a deity who wears a scorpion tail, and three seated attendants are painted black, in keeping with their connection to obsidian, the shiny, dark stone so important to Maya concepts of rulership and economic power. The Xultun ruler with the obsidian title and a scorpion tail is accompanied by a date (Text 9a) in February 749 CE, when the planet Jupiter was located in Scorpius, which the Maya visualized as a scorpion constellation. Xultun’s “scorpion king” seems to represent a local deity related to Jupiter, a planet elsewhere associated with K’awil, the god of Classic Maya rulers. K’awil’s smoking obsidian mirror may provide a link to the Xultun ruler, who bears an obsidian title in a scene associated with events involving Jupiter. Multiple texts in Los Sabios seem to refer to the planet Jupiter. Text 50 equates 27 six-month lunar periods with 12 synodic periods of Jupiter, and a Distance Number (Text 47) links 81 lunations with six synodic periods of Jupiter. The 819-day count in Text 12 relates to the cycles of Jupiter and Saturn. The cycles of Mars and Venus are also important in Text 12, which records intervals related to the commensuration of planetary cycles. Venus and Saturn also seem to be of interest in Texts 8 and 33, which record dates that mark relatively rare occultation events. The Long Count date in Text 43 is especially intriguing, for it is one day after the equinox in March 761 CE, when the Moon and Mars were together in Gemini and Jupiter was in retrograde motion positioned in Scorpius, a constellation where it was stationed during part of the year. That date is also 12 years after the 749 CE date associated with the ruler, when Jupiter was also located in the scorpion constellation.