• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Without a positional notation system, arithmetic is tedious and hard, as schoolchildren learn when teachers force them to multiply or subtract with Roman numerals. In Roman numerals, CLIV is 154, whereas XLII is 42. Maddeningly, both numbers have L (50) as the second symbol, but the two L’s aren’t equivalent, because the second is modified by the preceding X, which subtracts ten from it to make forty. Even though both CLIV and XLII are four-digit numbers, the left-hand symbol in the first number (C) cannot be directly compared with the left-hand symbol in the second (X). Positional notation symbols take the aggravation out of arithmetic.

Stirling’s stela in Tres Zapotes bore a Long Count date of 7.16.6.16.18. The implication is that by 32 B.C. the Olmec already had all three calendars and zero to boot. One can’t be sure, because the date does not include a zero or a reference to the other calendars. But it is hard to imagine how one could have a Long Count without them. Tentatively, therefore, archaeologists assign the invention of zero to sometime before 32 B.C., centuries ahead of its invention in India.

How long before 32 B.C.? The carved cadaver in San José Mogote may give a hint. In Mesoamerican cultures, the date of one’s birth was such an important augury of the future that people often acquired that day as their name. It was as if coming into the world on New Year’s Day were such a sign of good fortune that children born on that day would be named “January 1.” This seems to have been the case for the man whose death was celebrated in the San José Mogote temple. Between his feet are two glyphs, one resembling a stovepipe hat with a U painted across the front, the other looking vaguely like a smiling pet monster from a Japanese cartoon. According to Marcus, the Michigan anthropologist, the glyphs correspond to 1-Earthquake, the Zapotec name for the seventeenth day of the 260-day sacred calendar. Because the carving depicts a man instead of an event, the date is generally thought to be the dead man’s name. If so, 1-Earthquake is the first named person in the history of the Americas. Even if the date is not a name, the two glyphs indicate that by 750 B.C., when the slab was carved, the Zapotec were not only on the way to some form of writing, but had also assembled some of the astronomical and mathematical knowledge necessary for a calendar.

Discovered in 1975, this prone, disemboweled man was carved onto the stone threshold of a temple in San José Mogote, near the city of Oaxaca. Between the corpse’s feet is the oldest certainly dated writing in the Americas: two glyphs (shaded in drawing) that probably represent his name, 1-Earthquake. The ornate scroll issuing from his side is blood. According to Joyce Marcus, the first archaeologist to examine this bas-relief, the Zapotec words for “flower” and “sacrificial object” are similar enough that the flowery blood may be a visual pun.

To judge by the archaeological record, this development took place in an astonishingly compressed period; what took the Sumerians six thousand years apparently occurred in Mesoamerica in fewer than a thousand. Indeed, Mesoamerican societies during that time created more than a dozen systems of writing, some of which are known only from a single brief text. The exact chronology of their evolution remains unknown, but could be resolved by the next object that a farmer discovers in a field. The earliest known Olmec writing, for example, is on a potsherd from Chiapas that dates from about 300 B.C. For a long time nobody could read it. In 1986 a workcrew building a dock on the Acula River in Veracruz pulled out a seven-foot stela covered with Olmec symbols. Thought to have been written in 159 A.D., the twenty-one columns of glyphs were the first Olmec text long enough to permit linguists to decipher the language. Two linguists did just that in 1993. The stela recounted the rise of a warrior-king named Harvest Mountain Lord who celebrated his ascension to the throne by decapitating his main rival during