Riddles of the Ancient Maya Calendar
Two of these calendars were used very closely together by Maya priests. The two calendars were called the Tzolkin and Haab calendars. While very different from each other, used together they created an amazingly accurate system that created a 52 year cycle. Every day in that cycle was marked completely differently from every other day. This system of two calendars combined is called the Calendar Round.
Having an accurate calendar was very important to the ancient Maya. The Maya were very advanced in both math and astronomy, which allowed them to create such an accurate calendar. They would use the calendar to keep track of solar, lunar and astronomic events around which rituals and religious festivals were held.
The Haab calendar was very similar to our own. It had 18 months of 20 days each, producing a total of 360 days. To finish off the year, which has 365 days, the Maya added another 5 days which they called Wayeb. Unlike the rest of the days of the years, however, these days were not given individual names, and were considered unlucky. It would be like us having a day that was not a Sunday, or a Monday, or a Tuesday, or any day at all. Just a day! The Maya had five days like this every year. Religious rituals and festivals would be held upon these days.
Unlike the Haab calendar, which lasted for the same amount of time as our own calendar, the Tzolkin calendar was very different. It was used by many peoples of ancient Mexico and South America, but it was most advanced under the Maya.
In the Tzolkin calendar, there are 20 months, but these months only have 13 days each. This produces a year of only 260 days! Quite a bit shorter than our own year. The Tzolkin calendar was completely ritualistic, there was no natural process (such as the Earth’s rotation around the Sun) which was used as a basis for this calendar.
When Maya priests kept track of the calendar, then, they would mark the date using both the Tzolkin and the Haab calendars. This created the Calendar Round cycle that would repeat every 73 Tzolkin years and every 52 Haab years (both equal to 18,980 days). So whatever the date was, the Maya priests could look back through their records 52 Haab years or 73 Tzolkin years and it would be the exact same day on both calendars!
For both calendars, the Maya had twenty day names. These day names were each represented by a special glyph, or symbol. Although in different Maya dialects the glyphs might have different names, the symbols themselves were constant.
The Maya also had what is called the Long Count, a system that allowed them to look at time in large amounts. We have a similar system today: we have a decade representing 10 years, a century representing 100 years, and a millenium representing 1,000 years.
The ancient Maya broke up time in their Long Count like this:
20 kin (days) = 1 uinal (month)
18 uinal = 1 tun (year)
20 tun = 1 katun (20 years)
20 katun = 1 baktun (400 years)
20 baktun = 1 piktun (8,000 years)
20 piktun = 1 kalabtun (160,000 years)
20 kalabtun = 1 kinchiltun (3,200,000 years)
20 kinchiltun = 1 alautun (64,000,000 years)
As you can see, the Maya Long Count was capable of expressing huge amounts of time in a single word. (We have nothing that comes closing to representing 64,000,000 years. Why the Maya felt the need to have words representing these large amounts of time is not completely known.
You will also notice looking at the table above that almost all of their units go up by a degree of 20. This is because unlike us, the Maya had a base 20 number system, rather than base 10. So everything goes up in degrees of 20 in the Maya, while it goes up in degrees of 10 for us. Also note that the tun does not include the 5 special wayeb days of the Haab calendar, so a tun only has 360 days.
When using the Long Count to give the current date, the Maya would count the number of piktuns, baktuns, katuns, etc. from the beginning of their calendar to the current date, using their number system. To approximate this, we currently write dates in Maya time like this: 8.12.14.5.16. This means 8 baktun, 12 katun, 14 tun, 5 uinal and 16 kin. This date would be 3,454 years, 5 months and 16 days after the beginning of the calendar, or a total of 1,243,556 days! Although it ends up with large numbers, the Long Count allowed the Maya to write dates for any time in their calendar rather easily.
The riddle of the Maya calendar that has been a matter of much debate in our modern times is the meaning of the beginning and end of the Maya calendar. Most calendars do not give an ending date. Our own calendar we use today doesn’t. Do you know when a new calendar is going to be made and we are no longer going to add each year as another year of AD? No, we don’t. But the Maya knew exactly when their calendar was going to end.
The Maya had a cyclical view of time. What this means is that they saw everything in history as repeating. This included the creation and destruction of the world. They saw history as through different ages, which would go in a cycle then repeat with a new age. This was called the Great Cycle. They (and we) were/are living in the 3rd Age, which began in 3113 BC, and is going to end in 2012 AD, only a few years from now!
Modern day people have become fascinated by this fact, partly because the mystery surrounding the Maya already, and partly because the date is so close to us. (And getting closer all the time). Many questions are left unanswered. Why did the Maya choose 2012 as the end of their calendar? What do they think is going to happen in 2012?
One confusing part about these starting and end dates is that they both are so distant from the time that the Maya were actually developing their calendars. This would have been during the last centuries BC and the first centuries AD, yet their start date goes backwards in time thousands of years, and the end date goes forward in time thousands of years. The Maya were intelligent people, there must have been some reason for them to do this, but why?
One theory that has become popular in recent years is that the start and end dates of the Maya calendar have to do with astronomical events. We know that the Maya were very advanced in astronomy, and it is possible that there was some astronomic event that would recur about every 5100 years. However, no one is quite sure what that event might be, or why it would be so important to the Maya.
