History on stone, science on ash

Claim (verbatim)

Four Maya books survive — the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices and the Maya Codex of Mexico — against Diego de Landa's own report of the 1562 auto-da-fe at Mani: a great number of books found, and all of them burned as lies of the devil. All four survivors are instruments: Venus and eclipse tables, day-count multiplication tables, almanacs — the Dresden's Venus pages and its eclipse table are the exemplars. The monumental corpus, thousands of texts on stelae, lintels, and altars, is the opposite genre: dynastic event-record. The partition is a partition of media: predictive astronomy lived on paper and on the working walls of scribes — the Xultun murals, with their lunar reckonings and day-count multiples, are a scribal workshop, not a public monument — while history lived on stone. If so, Landa's fire was not a proportional sampling of Maya literature: it deleted the science class of the civilization's books nearly entire, and the four survivors are a genre remnant, not a library cross-section. Prediction: in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, ephemeris-table structures — day-count multiple tables and ring-number or serpent-number constructions serving Venus, eclipse, or lunar reckoning — will occur in the four codices and in scribal-context wall texts such as Xultun, but on fewer than 1% of public monumental texts, although monuments constitute the overwhelming majority of the glyphic corpus by text count (primary clause: the under-1% monumental share of ephemeris-table structures; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Macri-Looper), queried by text type and provenience, controlled against the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (Peabody Museum, Harvard) and the SLUB Dresden open digitization of the Codex Dresdensis; the computation is a genre-by-medium contingency table.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, ephemeris-table structures — day-count multiple tables and ring-number or serpent-number constructions serving Venus, eclipse, or lunar reckoning — will occur in the four codices and in scribal-context wall texts such as Xultun, but on fewer than 1% of public monumental texts, although monuments constitute the overwhelming majority of the glyphic corpus by text count (primary clause: the under-1% monumental share of ephemeris-table structures; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Macri-Looper), queried by text type and provenience, controlled against the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (Peabody Museum, Harvard) and the SLUB Dresden open digitization of the Codex Dresdensis; the computation is a genre-by-medium contingency table.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Mayanists have already established the medium-genre partition: ephemeris-table structures (day-count multiple tables, ring and serpent numbers) are known from the codices and, since 2012, from the Xultun scribal murals, with the Science paper stating that Classic-period precursors of the codex tables had not been found on any other medium; monuments record dynastic events. The under-1% MHD framing merely re-expresses a published categorical fact.

• W. Saturno, D. Stuart, A. Aveni & F. Rossi, 'Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala', Science 336 (2012)
• H.M. Bricker & V.R. Bricker, Astronomy in the Maya Codices (American Philosophical Society, 2011)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.