The Maya were obsessed with the passage of time. They believed that

events took place in repeating cycles — “What has happened before will happen again,” as Lord 6-Rabbit puts it — and they developed a variety of astonishingly accurate calendars to track the movements of the sun and the stars. The Maya kings and priests used their elaborate calendar systems and their advanced knowledge of astronomy to help manage their kingdoms, to determine when to wage war, and to predict the future.

THE LONG COUNT

The Long Count is the Maya calendar system that is probably closest to our own. Just as our Gregorian calendar counts the days and years from zero AD, the Maya counted from the day when they believed this world began. (Which, in our terms, was August 11, 3114 BC.) However, to make things a little more complicated, their year was only 360 days long. It is made up of eighteen months (or winal), each consisting of twenty days (or k’in). The Maya called this 360-day year a tun. Since they used a twenty-based counting system, their equivalent of our decade was a k’atun and it was twenty tuns long. Twenty k’atuns, or 400 tuns was called a bak’tun. This was equivalent to our century — though, of course,four times as long. The Maya Long Count will last for 13 bak’tuns (5,126 years), giving us an end date of December 21, 2012, precisely on the winter solstice. What was supposed to happen after that date is not well understood.

THE HAAB

Recognizing that the Long Count’s 360-day year was 5 days short, the

Maya devised another calendar called the Haab. To the eighteen 20-day months, they added a 5-day period called the Wayeb. These were considered to be days of uncertainty and bad luck when the portals between the mortal realm and the underworld dissolved and demons roamed the Earth.

THE TZOLK’IN

The Tzolk’in was the sacred calendar, used to predict the characteristics

of each day and determine the days for rituals, like a daily zodiac. It is

still in use by many Maya today, and it has been kept, without interruption

or losing a day, since the time of the Ancients. The calendar is made

up of twenty day names and thirteen numbers. It takes 260 days (the average length of a human pregnancy) to go through the full cycle of

name/number combinations. Each day name has a quality, some good,

some bad. For example, Imix (“Crocodile”) is full of complications and

problems, and thus bad for journeys or business deals. The number

(1–13) determines how strong the characteristic would be. So on 13 Imix,

you might want to stay home.

THE CALENDAR ROUND

The Calendar Round brings together the Haab with the Tzolk’in. It takes 18,980 days to work thought the 260 Tzolk’in days and the 365 Haab days. This is about fifty-two years. The Calendar Round is usually depicted as a series of interlocking cogs and wheels — which, in Middleworld, was the inspiration for the time machine in the Temple of Itzamna.

MONUMENT DATES

The Maya carved stone monuments to mark key points in the histories of their cities, whether for the inauguration of new buildings, the celebration of victories, the accession of kings, or the marking of significant passages of time. They carefully recorded the precise dates of these events in the carvings. Given the lack of other written sources, learning to decipher the date glyphs on monuments is an essential part of a Maya archaeologist’s training.

In writing a date, the Maya began with an introductory glyph that flags to the reader that a date is coming. The glyphs that immediately follow are the long count dates and they show how many bak’tuns,k’atuns, tuns, winals, and k’ins have passed since the world began. These are followed by the specific day from the ritual Tzolk’in calendar. Next comes what is known as the supplementary series, which might include one of nine night gods who ruled each day, as well as a cluster of glyphs to show the precise day within the lunar cycle. Last, the mason carves the day and month of the Haab calendar.

They had a 365-day solar calendar with months and days like ours, commonly known as the Haab. This calendar they shared with other Mesoamerican peoples; for example, the Aztecs, who called it Xiupohualli ("year-count"). Note that to both Mesoamericans and moderns, this is a cyclical calendar: your birthday, for example, comes around every year, as does Tax Time, planting, harvest, and Christmas.

They also had a nine-day cycle we call "Lords of the Night," which rotated like our days of the week. We refer to these little-understood days as the G-glyphs: G1, G2, etc.

The most ancient and widespread Mesoamerican calendar was the sacred 260-day Tzolk'in ("count of days") called by the Aztecs Tonalpohualli ("count of destiny"), with its concurrently-cycling 13 numerical coefficients and 20 names (like Manik' or "Deer," Ok or "Dog," Ik' or "Wind," etc.). An example of a Tzolk'in date would be 4 Ajaw in Maya, or 2-Acatl/2-Reed in Aztec. The Maya expressed most dates as a combination of the Tzolk'in and Haab , such as "4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u." This combination, called a Calendar Round or CR, is not unique in time, it cycles every 52 years. However, for most historical contexts it would do; most people will see only one example of any given CR in their lifetimes. Among the Aztecs, 52 years was the age to retire.

But the calendar we are concerned with here was the Long Count. It works much like our modern year-count (AD 1492 or 2009 or 2012), totaling up the days since an arbitrary "zero date," sometimes called "Era Date:" 11 (or 13) August 3114 BC/BCE. In its simplest form (in Late Formative monuments around the time of Christ, and in the Dresden Codex around the Conquest), a Long Count date was written as a five-digit (vigesimal) numeral, which we conventionally render like this: 9.7.17.12.14, or 9.14.0.0.0.