The Preface of the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, first panel on left, and the first three pages of the Table. Image credit: University of California, Santa Barbara. For more than a century the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex – a pre-Columbian Maya astronomical book dating to the 11th century – has been of great interest to scholars. The accuracy of its observations, especially the calculation of a kind of ‘leap year,’ was deemed...