Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar – one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages went by.48 It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of their belief that their calendar was
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
