The Long Count

Well we have had quite the tour of Mayan Calendars, but we wrap it up with this blog post. The Long Count is actually a simple idea. We simply pick a date in the distant past, and start counting the days since then. The start date is sometimes called the day of 'creation", but there does not seem to be any evidence the Mayans actually believed all creation started on that date. Rather it is just a way to keep time. Think of it rather as a starting point, like January 1st in the year 1 started the Gregorian Calendar.

Since we have a start date, we could make any date later after the start one big number. But the Mayans loved integrals of 20, and that is important to remember. Think of a cars odometer. Fresh from the factory we mights see it read 0.0.0.0.0. After it is driven for awile, it might read 6.5.4.1.2. This tell us that it has traveled 65,412 miles, or we can thing of it as 6 ten thousands, 5 thousands, 4 hundreds, 1 ten and 2 miles. So, chunks of 10's.


Well think of the Long Count as expressing the passage of time like that, but expressing it  in chunks of 1, 20, 360, 7,200 and 14,400.(More about the odd last two numbers later). So, in the Long Count, day 1 is 0.0.0.0.0. Day 2 is 0.0.0.0.1, and keeps going until the first slot hits 0.0.0.0.19. The next day, the Count is 0.0.0.1.0. The 1 tells us 20 days have passed. So a number like 0.0.0.11.14 tells us that 11 counts of 20, and 14 days have passed since the start.

OK now it gets tricky, (yeah, I know its already tricky, just stay with me). You see the second slot, rather than going to a maximum of 19, only goes to 17. (remember, we count the 0 as a day, so this reflects 18 days, though it says 17). This is so the third slot reflects almost a year, 360 days. So a number of 0.0.1.0.0 shows us 360 days have gone by. the next two slots show multiples of twenty, so if we look at the numkbers in order we see how many single days up to 19, how many 20 day sets up to 360, how many 360 day sets up to 7,200, (that is 20 X 360), and how many sets of 144,000 (20 X 7,200).

Each slot has a name, listed below.






Or we can put the name in the proper slot on our Mayan odometer:




To break it down a bit more:

20 kins	equal	1 uinal or 20 days
18 uinals	equal	1 tun or 360 days
20 tuns	equal	1 katun or 7,200 days
20 katuns	equal	1 baktun or 144,000 days

Got all that? OK, now many scientists have tried to figure out just what start date this calendar used. There are several theories, but most scientists now lean to the ancient starting date of the Long Count as being August 14, 3114 BC, or to be politically correct, BCE (Before Common Era).But some say it was August 13, some August 11, and some September 6. These are supported by some astronomical events that the Long Count dates were given on artifacts.

Next time, why we will be fine on Doomsday!

J.T. Turner, Mayanist