YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Barnhart

lines on the record: 262
first: 2024-09-30
most recent: 2024-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We are still debating that. I don't think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated. I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see archaeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular and we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that people are seasonally starving. I remember really stark evidence in Copan, Honduras. Copan was this beautiful city, lineage of seventeen kings, but the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The city of Chichenica becomes the next big capital in Yucatan? The word itza is actually a word describing the people who lived around Lake Pen Itza in northern Guatemala. And all of the Maya are super clear about that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichin Itza. So the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a failing of archaeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities, populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm and they lived in perishable houses and all Don't see a bunch of mass bodies. There's no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end, and we see that signature plain as day. We see, we know when a city was attacked and burned. Mostly that didn't happen. People moved and migrated, and it seems like right there around, like, between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top in the Most of it was in the rainforests of northern Guatemala, they move. They move in two directions. Some of them move into the highlands of Guatemala, and some of them move up into the Yucatan.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I call it the Age of Kings, where everybody's following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that's great. I mean, cities build up, populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too. Strong charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually, like happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts, all of a sudden there's this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And they start saying, well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things. And people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities, and that's how we get the mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor. But Jomia's dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he's got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons. So that's the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it's interesting that it's actually specifically the ninth Baktun of their history. The ninth Baktun begins in like 426 and it ends in like 829. So it's a 400 year period of time. And before that, there were Were no kings, and after that there really aren't kings. Their heads of councils.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you'll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically, that's the age of kings to me. That's when these cities decide that they're going to organize themselves around elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods. The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods. And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have basically snowed the rest of the people that they've got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods where everybody, every Jomia”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, midway through it, yeah. Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils. So, yeah, we have, pre-classic is like the origins of civilization. They're starting to build cities. They're starting to create their calendar. They're starting to create these wonderful works of art.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it was the Aztecs screwing things up. The Aztecs came down with all sorts of like, we'll buy everything you're making. And then eventually they were like, could we maybe buy some humans? Yeah. And then one family was like, no. And the other family was like, I don't know. And they're making us a lot of money. And, you know, they murdered each other and the water supply got polluted and then the city burned.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really was. I mean, and this happens in, I guess, 1250 AD. This Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them. We know the families. And of course, they were humans. So eventually they screwed it all up. One family murdered another family and the whole city burned”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a Maya democracy that happens, that individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. Each family has their own council house at Mayapon, though they live back at their place. It's kind of like a Maya Congress.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he could have been killed. I mean, in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of in the post-classic, they shed the idea of kings. They don't like kings anymore. That's probably a big part of why the classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings. And so they turn into this more council system at Chichenica. But then when Chichenitza falls, there's a new city that's architecture looks a lot like Chichenitza. It's called Mayapon, but it has what is called the League of Mayapon. And it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changed over time. So there was one guy named Chaks, who was the fire lord for the early part of a reign of a king called the Kalmonab, and then by the time he carves this other panel there's another guy in the position of Kakaho, which was the fire lord. And so he had”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule that it was hereditary, that that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that lived in the underworld. It also told us things about hierarchy, like that there were councils of lords underneath the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were revolving positions of authority. There was the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there Palenke had Lord's title named Fire Lord. That was one of the generals of their army. And we could tell that position”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There's, you know, basic things that archaeology, which is a very blunt tool, can figure out like this guy lives in a rich house. This guy lives in a poor house.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some communities that are using them. There's a couple of them that we had high hopes for, and then it was apparent that they were just making shit up. They didn't actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read. So they like made a bunch of stuff about what it says and they bring it out and they act like they can read it. When you ask him the details, they don't know. But then on a much simpler level, there's llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they've got the knots equaling how many llamas they have, and then they have subcategories of information, like this one's sick. We've lost these ones. This one's pregnant. So they have these more simple and more mathematical kipus, but they're using them to effect as a record.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But see, there's Peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology. There's so much out there. There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3,000 people all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity, and he had the communities Kipamayuks, not Kipus for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers, and if they were caught without their kipu in town they were flogged. So he had three thousand of the same kipu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its cemetery? There is a Rosetta stone.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think now we've just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a thousand kipus. There's enough to break the code. And I think this generation might be the one that does it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we can't break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language, though it wasn't written, it was weaved or knotted.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one long string that the little ones dangle off of, and each one of the dangling strings have sets of knots on them. And the knots, some of them are mathematical kipus, and those we can just do the math. We can prove that it's math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the libraries would just put, they'd say, pull that one down, read that one to me, and he'd pull it out and just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. So it was definitely writing. But in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called Kipukamayuks. Gathered up, had them read all of their kipus and transcribe them into Spanish books, and then had the kipus burned and those people murdered.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other one that fascinates me is from the Americas It's the Kipu. The Inca had the Kipu, this knotted string records, but it was definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots of, I can do the math kipus and figure out what they're totaling and things. Yeah, there's a kipu right there.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To kick it off the list because we can't break it, it had a big enough symbol set, but no one's been able to crack it, and now they're saying it's just an elaborate symbol set and doesn't reflect the spoken word.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a number of them. There's Easter Island script. I was just talking to, we've apparently made a few advances there now. It's called Rongo Rongo. And we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts. But we're beginning to break that. There's also the big one is Harappan. Harappin, for a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts on the planet. And those were Chinese cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Maya, and then Harappan, which is from northern India. That's the only one that we've never cracked. And now all the epigraphers, the people, that's the term for epigraphy is translating these languages. They're all ganging up on Happiness.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be coup ending in Sioux, and he showed how look, you know, this is suits, this is Sul, those two things that should be are the same symbol and that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we did realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Jori Konorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely shocked. The written language was a dead language. But Yuri, not knowing any of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts from America and Europe, went to it in the way that he was taught in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries and he looked at Yucatec language that they're speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system and he knew that there were certain sounds he used Landa's alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it and the dog a dog in Yucatec is Sul. So he saw two symbols and he said this one's probably Su and this one's Ul and then the turkey was Koots.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin, you know, how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin. Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't work for me at all. How did if there was one language, maybe two back then, how did it flower into thirty three mutually unintelligible languages in just five hundred years during acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population? How did that happen? So we're missing something huge here. I think it's more like Chinese where Chinese letters writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don't know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages in the Maya area after the last 500 years that they've been through.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were actually syllables. They were vowel, consonant, combinations. They weren't an alphabet. But that turned into our Rosetta stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya still speak that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya. Now there's where I get confused that we've got a single writing system that is intelligible. We've broken the code so we know that it's basically the same writing system from the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. We have 33 Maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then, that the glyphs are in to something called Chol tea, which is a combination of chor tea and chol two of those languages”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, boy, I mean, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta stone. We had a page out of Diego Delanda's book, A Priest Who was converting the Maya in Yucatan asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced they had an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy sat down in Spanish and he said, Okay, you're going to write all the symbols right here in my book, write an ah here, write a bay here, write a say here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, one of the things that confound me as a guy who spent a better portion of my life studying it, I had the honor of being the student of Linda Shealy right here at the University of Texas at Austin. She got the group together who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. I learned from the best and loved every minute of it. I miss Linda.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do love the mysteries of the world and I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don't want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they're one of the things that make world life worth living.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is everybody born with the signed Scorpio, a moody person? That's just objectively not true. But it is funny how oftentimes these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which's fascinating. At least that's fun. But no, I think I'm too much of a scientist to believe that I just don't have any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the... The month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. You know, I have a woo-woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff, but I don't think as a scientist it makes, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true. And, you know, when you look at it objectively, I mean.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, you know, there's a lot of things I don't have a reasonable explanation for, but the flood myth is almost certainly the rise in sea level.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of different opinions about it. And if they were all 13, if we have five creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional cycle. So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them were in the 300s of years. Some of them were in the 700s of years, but they were not the same time period. So our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation, or also be 13, it's in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations, their different time periods.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody. The first ones were made of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The third ones were like us, but flawed in some other way. And then we're finally made of the blood of the gods and corn. We're made out of corn. So we're perfect. And as it explains to us, the Popal Vu does, we got it right this time. There's no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration. One of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we talk to a lot at contact. They also had the concept of multiple creations before us, but they were real clear to the Spanish that they weren't all the same element.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are certain texts that go way forward in time or way backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the Bakhtun. Above that, there's the Piktun, then there's the Kalabatun, then there's Alawatun. And it goes on and on. And these are like, you know, 160,000 years. Huge increments of time. Whenever they want to do that, and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting 13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they're saying is they're making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That's what I think they're telling us in those texts that time goes on forever magically.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They love the number 13. It's all over the place. It's a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is not very solid, but I think that The magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end of the third creation hit the magical reset button. That it just restarted time right there because of their magic. But that was not to say that the natural Baktun cycle should be thirteen.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, technically we'd be in the fifth. Though my argument was that actually if you look through all the corpus of my mathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there's a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that Baktun place should have 20 Bakhtuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13. And there's a place in Palenque. There's a place in the Dresden Codex. And one other place I'm forgetting that all talk about time after 2012. How does that happen? That's a conflict”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures around the country. It's like Garrett Morris and Saturday Night Live. The Apocalypse was Betty-Betty Good to Me.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you do the math going from three thousand one hundred fourteen BC and count thirteen Boktunes forward you get to twenty twelve.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're technically in the fourth creation. And they have a creation story called The Popal Voo. And the Popal Vu is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the Hero Twins and the fourth creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count. And we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened. The fourth creation started on august eleventh, three thousand one hundred fourteen BC. And it says, it doesn't say it's day one. It says it's the last day of the thirteenth Baktun of the third creation. Which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 Baktunes long.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a batune is 400 of the long counts years. So it's kind of like our millennium. We think it's a big deal when we hit a millennium. Or a century. They have a twenty year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon, and then they have the 400 Baktun, which is the big one. That's like their millennium. And 13 of those Baktuns occurred in the creation before us. They also think that we were in...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That third, so they have days, months of twenty days, and then they have these years that should be by their math 400. But it's only 360. And that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up. Then they have a 20-year period and a 400-year period. 400 years to their calendar, but it's only by that time, it's only 396 years in our period, in our reckoning. So it's mysterious that it's why did they tweak it at the year to be only three hundred sixty days? That doesn't follow any astronomy, that's not the human cycle.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long counts, they're really mysterious, cool one because it's a linear count of days, which are not like them. It's a bunch of cycles like ours, you know, our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle. But it's weird in that its estimation of the year in the long count system is only 360 days. So it's miserably off a solar year. They count in base 20. So they count like we count in 10s. We're decimal. They count in base 20, but decimal. And so it should be there's ones, there's 20s, there's four hundreds, there's 8,000s, there's 160,000s. It goes just like R10s, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, but it's times 20.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, I don't know what time the year is. But their relatives changed it in the 1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off. They moved it sixty days back to make it in the spring again. But it drifts, which is strange because it's not a very good thing for the agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, though interestingly they never put a leap year in. The hob is also called the vague year because it's just 365, which means every year they're off a quarter of a day, and eventually it starts really adding up. In fact, it's even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math from a thousand years ago.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hub is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it's second though because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the two hundred sixty one. They say, well, we need a solar one too. Let's just keep counting this another hundred and five days and we'll get to 365.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From most Maya agree with this today. And, you know, who knows what the original architects thousands of years ago were thinking, but It's nine months. It's the human gestation period. So if you conceived on the day thirteen monkey, chances are your kids coming out on or near thirteen monkeys. And I think it's beautiful. I mean, if that's right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together. When they thought about time that's for us, they didn't look up into the heavens. They looked like into their bodies. What's the first cycle that we actually go through as humans? And they pick this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle. And no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And the Maya really feel this in this system. So that's the core system this 260 day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago. And it's the one that's most important today.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source