The Amazing Maya Calendar
The Amazing Maya Calendar
By Awake! writer in Mexico
FOR the ancient Maya, * the passing of time was of great significance. Their beliefs about events that would recur in certain cycles were reflected in their calendars.
What some authorities call the tzolkin (count of days) calendar consisted of a 260-day cycle divided into 13 numbered periods. Each period lasted 20 days, each day having its own distinctive name. The tzolkin calendar was the basis of the Maya’s ceremonial life and was used in divination.
Running concurrently with the ritual calendar was the civil, or haab, calendar. This was a solar calendar of 365 days. It had 19 months, 18 of them lasting 20 days; and one month had only five days, which brought the total to 365 days. Agriculture and everyday life were based on this solar year. The ingenious Maya combined both of these calendars into something researchers call the Calendar Round, thus producing dates from elements of each calendar. It took 52 years for this huge cycle of days to repeat itself. *
No artifact has been found that actually represents the entire Maya calendar. Scholars have gained their understanding of the calendar system by deciphering the handful of Maya books that have survived and by studying glyphs on Maya stelae and monuments.
Today, after centuries of research, the Maya calendar still delights the experts. It possessed such sophisticated features as precise adjustments to the length of the solar year and extraordinarily accurate mappings of the lunar and planetary cycles. Yes, all of this was skillfully calculated by the ancient Maya, who accurately marked the passing of time.
[Footnotes]
^ par. 3 See the article “The Maya—Yesterday and Today,” in the September 8, 2001, issue of Awake!
^ par. 5 In addition, the Maya used the Long Count calendar, which was essentially a continuous record of days from an ancient base date.
[Diagram/Pictures on page 31]
(For fully formatted text, see publication)
Tzolkin Haab
6 Caban 5 Pop
The date highlighted on the stela above is 6 Caban 5 Pop and corresponds to February 6, 752 C.E.
[Diagram/Pictures on page 31]
(For fully formatted text, see publication)
0 1 5
The Maya used the three symbols above in combination to represent every number
0 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19
Rather than 7 days, the tzolkin calendar had 20 days with names. Below are some of the symbols
Some symbols (glyphs) for the 19 months of the haab calendar
[Picture Credit Lines on page 31]
Top right and inset: HIP/Art Resource, NY; glyphs: An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs/Sylvanus Griswold Morlay/Dover Publications