Maya Calendar Part one: Long Count

Author: * ChanChan Tupac - 26 Posts on this thread out of 848 Posts sitewide.
Date: Nov 25, 2002 - 14:12

The Maya calendars

Part one: Long Count

The Maya were fascinated or one could say even obssesed by time.
That they were not alone in this fascination, one can conclude out of the fact
that there are several similarities with other cultures in the America's.
Take for example the Great Cycles: in many cultures there are myths and stories
about the 4 (in some cultures only 3) cycles that have past before the present cycle started.

Long Count

The first calendar that I'm going to talk about is, not surprisingly, a calendar to mesure the Great Cycles.

First Great Cycle	23.614 B.C.	-	18.489 B.C.
Second Great Cycle	18.489 B.C.	-	13.364 B.C.
Third Great Cycle	13.364 B.C.	-	8.239 B.C.
Fourth Great Cycle	8.239 B.C.	-	3.114 B.C.
Fifth Great Cycle	3.114 B.C.	-	2.012 A.D.

To be able to mesure the lengh of a Great Cycle, the Maya invented to so called Long Count.
The Long Count is divided into several periods of time:

Baktun: 144.000 days (= 20 Katun)
Katun: 7.200 days (= 20 Tun)
Tun: 360 days (= 18 Uinal)
Uinal: 20 days (= 20 Kin)
Kin: 1 day

This system is based on the vigesimal system of counting days.
I'll discuss the counting system later on.

The Long Count works from right to left and can be represented as simple flip-over scorebord:

baktun	katun	tun	uinal	kin
0	0	0	0	0

Where the baktun counts 13 flaps, the katun 20, the tun 20 the uinal 18 and the kin 20.
You've already learned from Xolotl Huascar that the Maya were familiar with the number zero,
so all the flaps start to count with zero. I wonder if the Maya would have said: From day zero, in stead of From day one *S*

Since 13 august 3114 BC^* till today, the 25th of November 2002:
12 baktun have past, 19 katun, 9 tun, 13 uinal and 19 kin

So the long count for today will look like this: 12.19.9.13.19

^*The exact starting date (i.e. the correlation date) is subject to discussion,
but it is beyond the scope of these descriptive pages.

But there is more!