tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 08 14:41:11 1994
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Mayan calendar
- From: [email protected] (Erich Schneider)
- Subject: Mayan calendar
- Date: Tue, 8 Nov 94 16:41:02 CST
Off topic, but just to clarify things for the record:
The "Mayan calendar" includes three ways to specify a day. The first
is called the "haab", which has eighteen twenty-day months and a
five-day shorter month (which was considered an unlucky time). Days
were numbered from 0 to 19 and occurred in what we would consider a
regular calendar order: the first day was 0 Pop, then 1 Pop, ..., 19
Pop, then 0 Uo, 1 Uo, etc. up to 18 Cumku, 19 Cumku, then 0 through 4
Uayeb (the unlucky "short month"). It is thus a 365-day cycle (the
Mayans knew about the error, but didn't bother to correct it).
The second naming scheme is called the "tzolkin", which has 20
"day-names" that occur 13 times in a 260-day cycle. A day's tzolkin
name is a number and a name; the number is the number of the day
within the cycle mod 13 plus 1, the name the name associated with the number
in the cycle mod 20. The first day of the cycle is 1 Imix, the second
2 Ik, the third 3 Akbal, etc., up to 13 Ben, then 1 Ix, 2 Men, etc. up
to 7 Ahau, then 8 Imix, 9 Ik, etc. Think of it as two interlocking
cycles, one of length 13, one of length 20.
The Aztec calendar uses these two cycles, but not the following one,
which gives a total 52-year cycle before a day's two names are
repeated together. (I believe this is the "reed" referred to in the
prophecy that Cortes was supposed to have fulfilled.)
The third naming scheme is the "long count". A long count date
consists of five numbers, usually written with dots between them,
interpreted as "baktun . katun . tun . uinal . kin". A "kin" is a
day. A "uinal" is a group of 20 kin. A "tun" is 18 uinal (360 days).
A "katun" is 20 tun, a "baktun" 20 katun (400 tun = 144000 days).
Each number denotes the day's position within the cycle of the next
higher length, the baktun denoting which baktun in the history of
the world the day exists in. The universe will have 13 baktun from
start to end; the Classic Mayan civilization arose and fell in the
span of two of them.
The three calendars are joined by the fact that the day of the world's
creation is "0.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku". What day this actually was is
still a subject of debate; various scholars have proposed various
"correlation constants" to convert between the Mayan calendar and the
Julian calendar. Using the "Goodman-Martinez-Thompson" correlation,
today (8 November 1994) is "12.19.1.11.0 1 Ahau 13 Zac". Using this
correlation, the world ends on December 22, 2012 (12.19.19.17.19 3
Cauac 2 Kankin), so there's still time for most of Shakespeare's works
and the Bible to be published in Klingon, and we can start on _The
Divine Comedy_. (Or perhaps the _Popul Vuh_, the Quiche Mayan creation
epic.)
-QumpIn 'avrIn
--
Erich Schneider [email protected] http://tamsun.tamu.edu/~ers0925