A Mayan manuscript


Mayan manuscripts retained the strict arrangement of squares and used the symbol for zero.

This sketch of a page from the Dresden Codex, one of the only three Mayan documents that escaped the book burnings of the Spanish priests, lists multiples of the the synodic period of Venus. The four numbers in the upper right show the digits

    4   4   4   3
   17   9   1  13
    6   4   2   0
    0   0   0   0

Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden
adapted from Ifrah, G. (2000) Universal History of Numbers. John Wiley & Sons.


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