The Mayan civilization established an intellectual superiority over other Indo-American cultures. This was manifested in their language and writing, in their conception of the cosmos and in their mathematical knowledge.
The system of temporal registration, which he shared with other Mesoamerican groups, constitutes an important instrument of historical and astronomical registration. Lately it has been discovered that the inscriptions that make up the calendar are more secular than was believed, since they also contain data on births, ascents, marriages and military victories of the reigning dynasties. Until now, the meaning of the signs outside the temporal register is unknown, but it is known that the classical language of the inscriptions is different from the Mayan language that was used when the Spanish conquest, six centuries after the fall of the classical period. The writing belonging to this period is idiographic and has 300 to 500 figures, the number depends on how the affixes are separated from the so-called main signs, so it will still be some time before specialists can decipher them all.
In mathematics they had achievements that surpassed with much to the one of the zero and the positional numeration. In astronomy they calculated with great accuracy the solar year which they divided into 18 months of 20 days each, they also had a sacred year, tzolkin, through which the priests detected the good and bad influences of each day according to an esoteric meaning of numbers and sign days, and a series of cycles: uinal of 20 days, tun of 360, katun of 7,200, bactun of 144,000 and alautun of 12,040,000,000. The Dresden codex contains very precise lunar and venusian tables, as well as a method for predicting solar eclipses.
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