Equinox at the Musical Pyramids
Two items appeared in the news last week about the Mexican pyramids so I’ve combined them into a single post for your amusement.
The first story concerned the gathering of thousands of onlookers who arrived at the El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza to witness the appearance of the serpent on the side of the steps of the pyramid. It occurs twice a year on the spring and autum equinoxes when the sun rises due east.
On these days the sunlight causes a serpent-shaped shadow to appear along the side of the pyramid’s main stairway, terminating at the bottom of the stairs with a head of a snake carved from stone.
Here is a video of the event:
The second story related a theory that the same pyramid, and another one on the Yucatán Peninsula, were designed as musical instruments.
To an observer on the ground, the feet of the many other tourists clambering up and down the pyramid’s steps create a sound simiar to that of raindrops falling into water.
To investigate further, Jorge Cruz of the Professional School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Mexico City and Nico Declercq of the Georgia Institute of Technology compared the frequency of sounds made by people walking up El Castillo with those made at the solid, uneven-stepped Moon Pyramid at Teotihuacan in central Mexico.
At each pyramid, they measured the sounds they heard near the base of the pyramid when a student was climbing higher up. Remarkably similar raindrop noises, of similar frequency, were recorded at both pyramids, suggesting that rather than being caused by El Castillo being hollow, the noise is probably caused by sound waves travelling through the steps hitting a corrugated surface, and being diffracted, causing the particular raindrop sound waves to propagate down along the stairs.
El Castillo is widely believed to have been devoted to the feathered serpent god Kukulcan, but Cruz thinks it may also have been a temple to the rain god Chaac. Indeed, a mask of Chaac is found at the top of El Castillo and also in the Moon Pyramid. “The Mexican pyramids, with some imagination, can be considered musical instruments dating back to the Mayan civilisation,” says Cruz, although he adds that there is no direct evidence that the Mayans actually played them.
Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist at Boston University, Massachusetts, says: “Most if not all Maya pyramids were conceived as sacred mountains, which were the places where the clouds gathered and created rain.” However, while the acoustics may have emphasised the metaphor of water, “the fact that there were echoes around them does not mean that they were musical instruments”, he says – adding that Mayan texts do not mention such a use.
Read the full story in New Scientist: Mayans ‘played’ pyramids to make music for rain god
The story reminds me of the theory by Californian acoustical engineer, David Lubman, which appeard in the National Geographic in 2002. Lubman suggested that by clapping one’s hands at the base of Kukulcan’s staircase a “chirped echo” is heard and that this “chir-roop” sound was intended by the designer to immitate the cry of the native quetzal bird.
Listen to the quetzal bird.See here and here for more information on that.
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