On August 11th, 3114 B.C. ...

... the Mayan of Central America started counting.

On December 21st, 2012 A.D., the remnants of the Maya in the highlands of Guatemala, will reach the end of their Great Cycle Long Count, 1,872,000 days after starting.

They didn't count in groups of ten like we do, they preferred to count in groups of 20's. Perhaps they used their toes or the both the front and backs of their fingers?


The Maya Calendar - Note the appearance of cycles within cycles with position-like pointers.

The Maya Calendar isn't really that complicated but the names given to the various "days, weeks, months and years" seem so random they are a daunting hurdle to understanding it.

Much like we do, the Mayan had useful intervals of time laid out in cycles.

Their basic cycle was the Count of Days, called the "Tzolkin" which lasted 260-days and consisted of a repeating 20-day "week".

The days of the week were, loosely translated, Alligator, Wind, House, Lizard, Serpent, Death, Deer, Rabbit, Water, Dog, Monkey, Grass, Reed, Jaguar, Eagle, Owl, Quake, Knife, Rain, and Flower. You will see their glyphs on the outer ring in the next picture.

I guess the Mayan went around saying TGIF! just like we do, except theirs stood for "Thank God It's Flower!"

Mayanists (people that study the Mayan) speculate that the 260-day cycle was based on the human gestation period which aligned with phases of planet Venus as well as interval between the planting and harvesting of the corn crop.

The 20-days made up one of their 18 months (or 19, if you include the extra month having the 5 extra days needed to get a 365-day year.) The months had names like Kayab, Zec, Sac, Cumhu, Xul, Ceh, and Pop.


The first large cycle "counts" is called the Calendar Round. This is when the 260-day count, the Tzolkin, and the 365-day Solar count (called the "Haab") come back to their begining points together. The Calendar Round is 18,980 days (or 52 years).

Here is where it starts getting a little tricky.

Venus has a 584-day cycle. In other words, it will rise as the morning star every 584 days and was no doubt tracked closely by the early Maya. There is some reason to suspect that the 260-day count arose, in part, to structure the related cycles of the Sun and Venus. The relationship between the solar and Venus cycles is this: 5 Venus cycles equals 8 solar years.

The nature of the Tzolkin, Solar, and Venus cycles are such that they all synchronize every 104 years, which happens to be exactly equal to two Calendar Rounds. The Venus Round is 37,960 days (or 104 years).

Now, remember that Mayans counted in groups of 20. So in addition to keeping track of where they were within each of the cycles mentioned above, they simply counted out time in groups of twenty.

1 day = 1 day
20 days = 1 uinal (month)
18 uinal = 1 tun (year) = 360 days
20 tuns = 1 katun = 7200 days
20 katuns = 1 baktun = 144,000 days
13 baktuns = 1 Great Cycle = 1,872,000 days
This is called the "Long Count" system.

The Long Count and tzolkin/year/Venus systems are theoretically unrelated, yet 37 Venus cycles = 3 katuns. So there is reason to think there is some yet to be re-discovered interweaving between these two systems. It has been noticed that both the Long Count and tzolkin/year/venus counts are used together in many of the archeological inscriptions throughout Central America.

Today's date is 11 Eb 5 Uo or Day 1,728,000:

Source

There is even an iPhone app to show you the Mayan date available (here).


So what happens when the Long Count reaches 1,872,000 days on December 21, 2012? I suspect the Mayans planned to simply turn the calendar over and use the other side.

Informational Source and More Details