Maya Calendars

Maya Calendar. The classic Maya shared certain calendared notions and principles with other Mesoamerican peoples, but they were the outstanding elaborators in this intellectual field. They possessed the sacred 260-day calendar, the tzolkin, presumably an ancient Mesoamerican development.

In Aztec equivalent was the tonalpohualli. The 260-day calendar corresponds to no natural astronomical phenomena; it is, rather, a pure invention. It works on a permutation principle of 13 numbers and 20-day names, which revolve about each other so that the same number and name recur in combination every 260 days. The tzolkin was closely allied to ritual and to divination.

The Maya were also cognizant of the solar year of 365-plus days, which they had organized into 18 months of 20 days each plus a period of 5 extra days. The permutation of the 260 – day tzolkin and the 365-day true year, rotating on each others cogwheel fashion, to use a figure of speech which surely would have been alien to the Maya mind produced the calendar round, or 52-year cycle.

That is, a complete cycle of all the variations of the day names and numbers of the tzolkin and the month names and day positions of the true year was run through in the least common multiple of 260 and 365, this being 18,980 days or 52 true years. Two other Maya calendars presuppose extremely careful and long-term astronomical observations and recordings. One of these, a lunar calendar, was based on the 29-and-a-fraction days between two successive new moons.

The other, a Venus calendar, integrated five 584-day revolutions of the planet Venus with eight 365-day solar years. The Dresden Codex dealt with both lunar and Venus calendars.

Most impressive of all as a feat of calenderers, and also most important for archaeological dating, is the Maya Long Count, or Initial Series, calendar. The Long Count Calendar essentially involved counting days from a mythical starting point in the past. It was based on astronomical knowledge, place enumeration and notation, a concept of zero, and a counting system based on the number 20. Long Count inscriptions on stelae read from top down and from left to right. Hieroglyphs indicated the time periods unit of the system and bars, signifying 5, and dots, representing 1, served as numerals.

The units of time, in descending order, were the baktun of 144,000 days, the katun of 7,200 days, the tun of 360 days, the uinal of 20 days, and the kin of 1 day- successive multiples of 20 except the tun, which was comprised of 18 uinals, apparently to approximate the true year. A Maya Long Count date, which expressed as 9.14.19.8.0, refers to a date, which is 9x144, 000 plus 4x7200 plus 19x360 plus 8x20 plus 0x1 days from the calendrical starting point in the past.

This starting point in the past was fixed at 3113 B.C in the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation of Maya and Christian calendars, and approximately 260 years earlier than this date in the Spinden correlation.

The earliest Maya stelae Long Count date is from Tikal. It falls in the twelfth katun of the eighth baktun (8.12.14.8.15) and has a Christian calendrical equivalent of A.D 292 in the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation. The most recent Maya Long Count stelae date is 10.3.0.0.0 or A.D 889. These dates bracket the Maya classic Period.