How the Mayan calendar actually works
Mayan calender / Hannah Gleghorn
With chatter about the Mayan apocalypse intensifying as Dec. 21 approaches, you may have seen that while the ancient Mayan calendar "ends" on that day, the Maya themselves would not have seen that as the end of the world. But how does the Mayan calendar work, anyway?
It's not as confusing as it might seem. The ancient Maya kept time in a very different way than we do today, and their hieroglyph-heavy calendar can seem daunting at first glance. But the basic principle is simply that the Maya were counting the days.
"That's somewhat different from our own calendar, which is really tied to the length of the solar year," said Walter Witschey, an archaeologist and Maya expert at Longwood University in Virginia.
Three calendars
The first thing to understand is that the Maya used three different calendars. The first was the sacred calendar, or Tzolk'in, which lasted 260 days and then started over again, just as our 365-day calendar refreshes once it hits Dec. 31. This calendar was important for scheduling religious ceremonies.
The second calendar was the Haab', or secular calendar, which lasted 365 days but did not account for the extra quarter-day it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun. (The modern calendar accounts for this fraction by adding a day to February every four years, the reason we have leap years.) That means the calendar wandered a bit in relation to the seasons.
The final calendar was the Long Count Calendar — the recording method that has caused all of the doomsday brouhaha of 2012. On Dec. 21 (approximately), the calendar completes a major cycle, which has triggered doomsday fears and mystical rumors about the end of an age. [Full Coverage: The Mayan Apocalypse (Not)]
The Maya shared our culture's fascination with calendar mile-markers and would have likely considered the date important, Witschey told LiveScience. But they did not make any doomsday predictions about the date. The only two carvings ever found referring to the date depict contemporary kings and their predicted long-lasting legacies, Witschey said.
"Suppose I said to you that George Washington is so important that we will still consider him a revered national leader in the year 3000," Witschey said. "So now you've got the rollover of the zeros, you've got an important contemporaneous figure, and you're looking forward to the future." That's what the Mayan carvings are trying to accomplish, he said.
How the Long Count Calendar works
The Long Count Calendar may not predict doomsday, but it is good at covering long periods of time. Here's how it works: Dates are written out as five numbers separated by four periods, such as 13.0.0.0.0. (The ancient Maya represented these not with numerals, of course, but with their own hieroglyphs.)
The right-most position is called the k'in, which counts single days: 13.0.0.0.1, for example. The k'in counts up to 19 and then flips back to zero, with counting picked back up by the next position, the uinal. So 13.0.0.0.19 would become 13.0.0.1.0, much like a car odometer. [Images: Mayan Calendar Carvings]
Each uinal is thus a block of 20 days. The k'in position then picks back up, counting up to that 20, which then gets added to the uinal. So the day after 13.0.0.1.0 would be 13.0.0.1.1 and then 13.0.0.1.2, all the way up to 13.0.0.1.19 and finally 13.0.0.2.0.
The uinals count upward as well. While the Maya generally use a base-20 counting system, Witschey said, they modify this slightly for the uinal, which only counts up to 17 before rolling over to the third position, the tun. Each tun is thus 18 blocks of 20 days, or 360 days — approximately a year by the solar calendar.
Tuns, in turn, count up to 20 before rolling over into k'atuns. As 20 blocks of 360 days, each k'atun translates into 7,200 days, or just less than 20 years. The k'atun place then counts up before rolling over into the final digit, the b'ak'tun.
If that word sounds familiar, it's because Dec. 21, 2012, on our calendar marks the end of the 13th b'ak'tun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. In other words, it's the day the count will read 13.0.0.0.0. On Dec. 22, it will read 13.0.0.0.1.
Each b'ak'tun is 144,000 days long, or a little less than 400 years. To the ancient Maya, 13 b'ak'tuns represented a full cycle of creation; one carving refers to a god associated with calendar changes returning that day. There are no apocalyptic prophecies, however. In fact, the Maya had several rarely used units that were even larger than b'ak'tuns, giving them the capacity to count millions of years into the future, Witschey said.
"That, actually, is one of the lines of evidence that they didn't think their world was ending at 13.0.0.0.0," Witschey said.
Another hiccup for Mayan doomsday believers: Although many scholars agree that Dec. 21 is the proper date on our calendar matching the end of the 13th b'ak'tun, there is some uncertainty over this, because some Mayan calendar units may have clicked over at sunset and others at sunrise. Some researchers have suggested that Dec. 23 or 24 may be a more accurate fit, Witschey said. Either way, however, the Maya would not have been running for their doomsday bunkers.
"You'll get up in the morning and go forward, and the Maya cycles will have clicked over another day," Witschey said.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappasor LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook& Google+.
- Oops! 11 Failed Doomsday Predictions
- Doom and Gloom: Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Worlds
- In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World
Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Popular in SciTech
- Apple's next iPhone may be coming in June
- Thousands online proclaim: Jahar Tsarnaev is innocent
- "God particle": Why the Higgs boson matters
- Alternatives to Google Reader
- Drone technology myths, facts and future feats
- Apple's iPhone 6 may have bigger screen, analyst says
- 40 years later: Why the Endangered Species Act still matters
- Texting while walking banned in N.J. town
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=08rebIJl-xI
But fear mongering and fraud has been a useful tool for New World Order crooks to scam the gullible for years. They warned constantly about the Soviet Union leveling the U.S., but, when the USSR broke up, it was revealed they didn't have anywhere near the armament that the NWO used to keep the gullible terrified during the Cold War. The new lie of "terrorism" wasn't necessarily going to be so easy to put over, so they engineered a "proof" that it existed, namely, September 11. But facets such as that the incidents did not fit the "official story"; nothing like that had been tried before; it was so big, it would provoke responses no ragtag group of dissidents would bring down on themselves; and every other "attack" on American soil failed because of the "incompetence" of the "perpetrators" indicates that September 11 was a fraud. Add such other aspects as the warning, repeated endlessly, that "the ports of America are porous to 'terrorist' intrusions". It was engineered to create fear among the malleable, with the New World Order gambling that the malleable would be so dim they couldn't see that, for all that this was supposed to be a way for "terrorists" to get in easily, none of them tried! "Hurricane" Sandy was an engineered "disaster" intended to allow the crooks to scam fast money from the govenrment for "repairs" and to prepare the gullible for the unleashing of wholesale and unending martial law after a future major "catastrophe". Electrical outages during Sandy were caused by power companies simply turning off the electricity; "floods" were caused, in some cases, by communities with reservoirs opening the floodgates to inundate low lying communities, and, in other areas, by simple lies that the gullible believed; damage was caused by machinery ripping up the land, confident that forced evacuations would leave few if any to testify to what really happened. And, now the event at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has numerous flaws and errors in the "official story", but which the gullible can't or won't see or refuse to admit they see.
Many may deride people who respond with fear, but the New World Order thrives based on it. Yet those who condemn people for allowing themselves to believe the Mayan calendar story without proof never attack the New World Order for using the same unproved fright tales to sell their criminal agenda!
Dude, where's your tin-foil hat?! Oh, the aliens have it, huh?
Wow, it's scary how some people think.
Oops! Hope the New World Order isn't reading my comments!
As well, I'm sure it would be a big bang, we won't feel a thing.
Please Google: akes pains do the Mayans know something we dont