How many calendars did the maya have

Another calendar was thus devised, called the Long Count. The Long Count was based on the following units of time: a kin one day ; a uinal a month of 20 kins ; a tun a year of kins or 18 uinals ; a katun 20 tuns ; a baktun 20 katuns , or years. Larger units included the pictun , the calabtun , the kinchiltun and the analtun. Each analtun was equivalent to 64 million years.

The Long Count starts from the beginning of the current creation cycle, and corresponds to the present age. The date of this creation is set at either B. This is the starting date for all subsequent counting - similar to our use of the birth of Christ as a starting point for modern historical dates. To indicate a date, the Maya calendar used five figures in this order: baktun, katun, tun, uin, kin. This would be written as, for example: 9.

This gives us a total of 1,, days approximately 3, solar years since the beginning of the last Creation, at the Maya calendar round position of 10 Chuen, 4 Kumku. This would be equivalent to a date sometime in our year A. One of the most important roles of the calendar was not to fix dates accurately in time, however, but to correlate the actions of Maya rulers to historic and mythological events.

The acts of gods performed in the days of myth were reenacted by Maya rulers, often on the anniversary of the original event - a date which was carefully calculated by Maya priests. The calendar was also used to mark the time of past and future happenings.

Instead, it is made from a succession of 20 day glyphs in combination with the numbers 1 to 13, and produces unique days. Multiplying 20 x 13 equals days. During this ceremony, new calendar Day Keepers are initiated.

He has been a calendar Day Keeper for more than 30 years. The Maya believe that when a person reaches 52 years of age, they attain the special wisdom of an elder.

Any historical or mythical event spanning more than 52 years required the ancient Maya to use an additional calendar, the Long Count. The Long Count calendar is a system that counts 5 cycles of time. This is very similar to the Gregorian calendar system that counts days, months, years, centuries and millennia.

The Maya system also does this, but the difference is in the name and magnitude of the various cycles. With no specific threat indicated by the Maya, a number of doomsday theories have cropped up. Such threats include either a meteor, comet, asteroid, or newly discovered Planet "Nibiru" colliding with the Earth; the magnetic poles reversing, causing a series of mega-earthquakes; even a black hole spontaneously appearing near Earth to swallow it whole.

Credible scientists have of course debunked these prophecies as being unrealistic, at least in terms of imminence. The most recent discovery debunking the doomsday myth was announced in May of this year in Science by William Saturno, professor of archaeology at Boston University, when he uncovered evidence at the Xultun site in Guatemala that indicates time is marked past the year It is another myth that the Mayans support the doomsday theory.

He said, " is not the end of the world, nor did we ever predict that it would end: not now, not at the end of our Long Count calendar, not on December 21, Most people appear to be resting easier about end-of-the-world predictions and are dismissing the idea. Inevitably, however, doomsday predictors will choose another date at some point in the future, based on even less scientific evidence than the resetting of the Mayan Long Count calendar.

Search Search. You are here Home. Here are the units of time that they use, similar to our days, weeks, months, years, decades, etc. It is the religious calendar of the Maya Civilization. For boys the number of the day he was born will go before his name. Dates and times of year do tend to become parts of a culture, for us, look at how May, April, and August have become relatively popular names.

The third part of the calendar is the Haab. Each day is shown as a number in the month and the name of the month. An example of this from the example date April 29, we use later in the blog reads as: 9 Wo.

The Haab is seen as somewhat inaccurate because it consists of days that it takes the earth to orbit the sun. During my journey to the ruins we passed through a marketplace where the individuals who are descendants of the ancient Maya, produce and sell authentic Mayan goods and you can watch them create by hand.