Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days. The Gregorian calendar therefore incorporates a very small plus error, just 0.0003 of a day – pretty impressive accuracy for the sixteenth century. Strangely enough, though its origins are wrapped in the mists of antiquity far deeper than the sixteenth century, the Mayan calendar achieved even greater accuracy. It calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days, a minus error of only 0.0002 of a day.10 Similarly, the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days – extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.11