Akhenaten was known as Egypt’s Rebel Pharaoh. He lived during the 14th century BCE in a huge desert city he built from scratch named “Horizon of the Aten sun god” (today called Amarna). His mummy has never been found, and he disappeared from history at age 37. During his reign, he was obsessed with sunrises and worshipping the sun. He shut down the temples of all other gods, and destroyed their idols. He was called the “rebel” and the “heretic” in later Egyptian texts, and his reign was referred to as the “rebellion”. His own statues were in turn destroyed under the orders of later vengeful Pharaohs.
Meanwhile, an ocean away in Mexico, the Maya Sacred 260-day calendar is the world’s most enigmatic. Called the Tzolk’in or Cholq’ij (“counting of the days”), it is unique and unparalleled in the ancient world, and its origins are still contested. It is composed of one cycle of thirteen numbers and one of twenty day names. Could the complex religious ideas of Egypt’s first religious revolutionary have inspired a strange 260-day sacred calendar developed somewhere in the jungles of Mexico over three thousand years ago?
Statue of Akhenaten from the Aten temple at Karnak. (Jon Bodsworth/CC0)
Mexican Mysteries
It has long been acknowledged that ancient architecture across Mexico was generally aligned to sunrises on certain days of the year. It is also becoming clear that these sunrise dates may have helped create the Maya 260-day calendar. Archaeologist Ivan Šprajc notes:
“The orientations of important civic and ceremonial Mesoamerican buildings exhibit a clearly non-uniform distribution, indicating that they refer predominantly to astronomical phenomena observable on the horizon. No other possible orientation motive, such as climate, local topography, magnetism, or defense, can account for the widespread and long-lasting alignment groups. The only conceivable rationale is that the orientations refer to sunrises and sunsets on agriculturally important dates.”
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