Alternate Calendars :: Maya Calendar Round Explained
Possibly the greatest intellectual achievement of the Maya was their complex calendar system. They operated two calendars
at once: one of 260 days, the other 360 days. The Maya inherited the shorter of the two from the Zapotec civilization of
the Oaxaca Valley in Mexico, who began to record dates in this way around 600 BCE. There were twenty named days in this
calendar; each repeated thirteen times, making a short “year” of 260 days called a tzolkin.
This was not only a way of keeping time but also a guide to the future, as leading Mayanist Professor Michael Coe makes clear:
In the Guatemalan highlands today there are still calendar priests who can name the right day in the 260-day count.
How did this short year tie in with the real year? After seventy-three 260 day periods (18.980 days) fifty-two actual years have passed, at which point the two calendars have synchronized again. So a Calendar Round that began again every fifty-two years was developed.
A calendrical cycle that repeated itself after only some fifty years seems very short for a culture with such mathematical ability as the Maya. Here we may have the spur to their creation of the Long Count calendar in the first century BCE. The everyday Maya calendar was made up of eighteen months of twenty days each, with a greatly feared extra five unlucky days added on at the end, to round up to 365 days to match the solar year. Presumably because these didn’t fit neatly in their counting system based on twenties, the Maya ignored the five additional days and stuck to a 360- day period (a tun) for their Long Count.
The Long Count was made up of a series of increasingly large quantities counting upward from one day (a kin):
18 uinals = 1 tun (360 days)
20 tuns = 1 katun (7,200 days) (19 modern years)
20 katuns = 1 baktun (144,000 days) (394.3 modern years)
There were then thought to be thirteen baktuns within a Great Cycle of 1,872,000 days (or some 5,130 years). All dates were expressed relative to a date in August 3114 BCE when the present Great Cycle or World Age was said to have begun. This has been thought to represent the creation of the world, or the gods, but it is more likely to be a mythical date for the creation of the Maya themselves, as there are inscriptions referring to events among the gods in times even before this.
The end of the current Great Cycle is scheduled for December 23, 2012, when Mayan prophecy says that the world as we know it will come to an end with an overwhelming flood. This is not the only element of prophecy involved in the Great Cycle, however, for as with the Calendar Round, events were thought to repeat themselves. Each katun was named from the day it ended, and owning to the way the calendar was constructed, only thirteen different days could fall at the end of a katun. So after each period of 260 tuns (93,000 days or slightly over 256 years), a katun of the same name would begin, lasting just under twenty years. As time passed, each of the thirteen katuns acquired a reputation, ten of them bad, suggesting rather a gloomy outlook on the part of the Maya. One of the worst was katun 8 Ahau, which signaled fighting and political change.
During the katun 8 Ahau, which lasted from 1441 to 1461, a disaster overtook the Mayan Itza tribe that ruled over Chichen Itza in the northern Yucatan peninsula. They were driven from their homes, just as they had been in the previous katun 8 Ahau, when they wandered through the rain forest before eventually chancing on the abandoned city that they named Chichen Itza. This time they retraced their steps southward until they reached Lake Peten Itza in northern Guatemala where they founded a new capital Tah Itza, on an island. Hernan Cortez visited Tayasal, as the Spanish named it, in 1524, but did not stay long. Even after the Spanish had secured the whole of Central Americal the Itza remained untouched in Tayasal.
Only in the seventeenth century did the Spanish decided that an independent Tayasal was an affront. The church led the way, sending missionaries to convert the Itza without success. The last group to try was led by the Franciscan monk Fray Andres de Avendano, who visited Tayasal in January 1696. Avendano warned the Itza that katun 8 Ahau was about to return, bringing massive upheavals with it, and that the time to convert to Christianity had therefore come. The Itza did not submit immediately, but the same year the nephew of the king of Tayasal is recorded as presenting his uncle’s feather headdress to the governor of Yucatan as a sign of their willingness to accept Spanish authority. The Itza were not quick enough, however, or perhaps the governor saw a chance for some looting, as Spanish troops attacked Tayasal in March 1697, four months before the end of the katun. Despite their reputation as feared warriors, the Itza put up only a brief struggle – perhaps they already knew they had lost before the fighting began.
Earlier katun cycles also seem to have marked major upheavals. Around 278 CE there was a decisive shift in power as the southern Maya declined, after the catastrophic eruption of the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador, while lowland Maya cities gained the upper hand. Two hundred and fifty-six years later (534 CE), at the corresponding point in the next cycle, the great city of Tikal, among others in the lowlands, declined dramatically. There was internal dissension, possibly a peasant revolt, with the widespread and deliberate damaging of public monuments. In the case of Tikal this seems to have been sparked off by a disastrous defeat at the hands of its aggressive neighbor, Caracol in Belize. (Only at the beginning of the seventeenth century did the lowlands recover.) Finally, 790 CE saw the last of the standing stones erected at Tikal, marking the beginning of the equivalent point in the following cycle. Given the disasters that had happened at previous intervals of 256 years, a crisis was surely expected. Indeed it did come, this time bringing an end to lowland Maya civilization.
James, Peter and Thorpe, Nick. Ancient Mysteries. New York, Ballantine Books, 1999.