There are at least three Mayan calendars. I was listening to the How Stuff Works: Mayan Calendar podcast, and learned that the Mayan calendars are not as strange as I expected them to be. Let’s first look at how our years are structured:

1
millenium
9
century
5
decade
7
year

When the last component overflows (from 9 to 0), we carry one and increment the decade. When the decade overflows we increment the century. This is how base 10 numbers work.

Now let’s look at how dates are structured:

1957
year
Jul
month
23
day

When the last component (day) overflows from 31 to 1, we carry one and increment the month. When the month overflows from Dec to Jan, we increment the year. This is very similar to how base 10 numbers work, except that each component has its own rules for when it overflows, and months don’t all have the same number of days.

How are weekdays numbered? We can say both the day of week and the day of month, and increment both each day:

Tuesday
weekday
the 23rd
day of month

The Mayan Tzolk’in calendar works like this. Both components are incremented each time. One component has 20 days and the other has 13 days, and they line up every 260 days.

12
trecena
Lamat
day name

The Mayan Haab calendar is more conventional, lasting 365 days. There are 18 months each with 20 days, giving 360 days, plus an extra 5 days to make it fill a year. They didn’t handle leap years.

17
month
K’ayab
day

The Mayan Long Count calendar is the one people are worked up over. There are five (or maybe nine) “digits”, each base 20 except one that’s base 18 to match the months of the Haab calendar. However the Long Count calendar doesn’t include the extra 5 days, so it doesn’t stay lined up with Haab.

12
baktun
19
katun
19
tun (year)
17
uinal (month)
15
kin (day)

What’s the big deal about 21 Dec 2012? It’s 13.0.0.0.0, at least under the most common translation of our calendar to the Mayan calendar. It’s sort of like how people celebrated the year 2 0 0 0. It’s nice to celebrate a bunch of zeros. Some interpretations say that it doesn’t go to 13.0.0.0.0 but resets back to 0.0.0.0.0, but it’s not universally agreed upon, and some say that there are four more places in the calendar system, so it’d be 0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0, resetting only after 63 million years.

In any case, the thing I find strangest about the Mayan calendar systems is that there are so many of them, somewhat incompatible with each other. In addition to the three I described above, there’s a 9 day cycle, a lunar cycle, a Venus cycle, and a few others. See the Wikipedia page for a reasonable overview. If you use Emacs, the Mayan calendar is included, and you can use M-: (calendar-mayan-date-string) to get back a string like "Long count = 12.19.19.17.15; tzolkin = 12 Men; haab = 18 Mac".

Appendix: 13.0.0.0.0 dates

There are different translations between Mayan dates and our dates. A lot of this has to be reconstructed because Christians burned the Mayan books. I translated the Wikipedia list of date translations into a list of dates for 13.0.0.0.0:

Correlation name13.0.0.0.0
Bowditch1493-04-26
Willson1614-12-11
Smiley1734-11-05
Makemson1752-06-22
Modified Spinden1753-02-22
Spinden1753-02-23
Teeple1762-01-05
Dinsmoor1776-05-28
−4CR1805-02-10
−2CR1909-01-16
Stock1936-08-27
Goodman2012-12-18
Martinez-Hernandez2012-12-19
GMT2012-12-21
Modified Thompson 12012-12-22
Thompson (Lounsbury)2012-12-23
Pogo2024-11-11
+2CR2116-11-26
Böhm & Böhm2116-12-14
Kreichgauer2129-09-23
+4CR2220-11-01
Fuls, et al.2220-11-06
Hochleitner2259-05-03
Schultz2268-10-20
Escalona-Ramos2272-08-05
Vaillant2272-10-19
Weitzel2532-08-12

6 comments:

Unknown wrote at Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:31:00 AM PST

It's interesting that even today, Gregorian, Jewish and Muslim calendars have diferent dates.

Most of the people really wont care much about the 21th December.

Obviously "I survived Maya end of the world" t-shirt makers will disagree with me..

Sparkly Space Child wrote at Friday, December 21, 2012 at 10:24:00 PM PST

No..the biggest thing about December 21st is that it is Evie's birthday!

Mayank wrote at Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 7:24:00 AM PST

these different calenders are real mysteries fr me... everyone has there own suitable dates...gosh!

Mayank wrote at Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 7:26:00 AM PST

these diff. calenders r always mysteries fr me. gosh... every communities hs der own... i blv these should b 1 standard around the world

Anonymous wrote at Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 8:23:00 AM PDT

A lot of people seem to make the mistake of interpreting one person's actions as the consensus of an entire religion.

rob wrote at Wednesday, February 3, 2016 at 8:47:00 AM PST

You probably know this, but GMT and Lounsbury are the two most accepted Julian day translations, by the way, Amit. (How have you been? Long time no talk.)