Free Our Cosmic Ancestors by Maurice Chatelain Page B

my calculations are reasonably accurate, some other quite rare astronomical occurrence took place in the skies over the Mayan temples in that year -a double eclipse of the Sun and of the Moon during the same year. The exact dates were 23 November for the eclipse of the Sun and 3 June for that of the Moon.
    When I also discovered that the count of days in each sacred year was 260, the same number as katuns in the Great Cycle, all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. For the Mayas the katun of 7,254 days was not only a measure of time but also an astronomical unit to express the synodic periods of revolution of planets, or the count of days needed for each planet to be aligned with the Sun and the Earth. For example, 5 katuns were equal to 313 revolutions of Mercury, 13 katuns were equal to 121 revolutions of Mars, or 27 katuns were equal to 7 returns of Halley's comet.
    It seems that, like the Sumerians, the Mayas were familiar with the constant of Nineveh - but in another form. .their time was counted in days, not seconds. For years the professional archaeologists searching the ruins of the Mayan temples had found fantastically high numbers engraved in stone. These numbers corresponded to millions of years or billions of days, while the officially recognized age of mankind, according to scientists of that time, was only 6,000 years - one reason why the gigantic numbers meant nothing to those early archaeologists and were simply dismissed. Many years later a courageous author suggested that one of these mysterious numbers represented a cycle of 23,040 millions of days, or 64 millions of Mayan years of 360 days each, called an `alautun'. But still nobody paid any attention, and the huge Mayan numbers were forgotten once more.

    The date of this Mayan Disc of Chinkultic had been estimated as AD 587 but it could be much older. It actually shows, since the origin of the calendar, an elapsed time of 11 days, 14 months,
12 years, 17 katuns, 7 baktuns, and 9 Great Cycles. That seems to indicate the year 14 BC for the disc and the year 49,611 BC for the origin of the Mayan calendar. After all, it is only 1 baktun before the start of the Egyptian calendar in 49,214 BC.

    Mayan astronomical clock
    Classical period from AD 233-1027. The outer circle indicates the dates of our present calendar. The middle circle indicates the Mayan dates in baktuns and katuns. The inner circle indicates the Mayan dates in tuns
    This clock showing the classical Mayan period, AD 233-1027. is based on the same principle as the calendar, but for only 290,160 days, or 372 Mars cycles. The Mayas also had a shorter calendar of 37,960 days representing 65 Venus cycles of 584 days, or 104 solar years of 365 days, or 146 sacred years of 260 days.
    I must admit myself that when I first heard about the gigantic Mayan numbers I saw no importance in them and simply decided the ancient Mayas had been addicted to big numbers as some people are addicted to drugs, religion, or sex. It was only after I had discovered the constant of Nineveh and the secret of the Mayan calendar that my new respect for the achievements of our ancestors made me wonder if there could have been some common knowledge between the Sumerians who counted by sixty and the Mayas who counted by twenty. Most other people of antiquity used the decimal system like the Egyptians or counted by the dozen like the ancient Gauls or Babylonians.
    One day as I looked at some notes taken years ago in Paris during a long discussion with my French specialist in Mayan culture, I noticed two especially mysterious numbers that had been found engraved in some Mayan ruins. One was 34,020 millions of days or about 93 millions of years and the other 147,420 millions of days or a little more than 403 millions of years. Expressed in sacred years of 260 days, the second number represented exactly 567 million years.
    It is difficult to blame the archaeologists for ignoring these numbers. But since I am