Mayan Calendar Doom!!!!!!!

Most people don't really think about the fact, but we use more than one calendar in our day to day lives. One goes March 1, March 2, March 3, et cetera. The other goes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on. The former was originally based on the phases of the moon (though it has since been changed to fit in a predictable manner into the year), the latter is based on the age-old principle of “because we feel like it, that's why”.

Because of this complete unconnectedness, there is no easy way to predict how the two calendars will mesh up. We know that the day after August 31^st is always going to be September 1^st, and that the day before Thursday will always be Wednesday. But is September the 1^st going to be a Wednesday? We usually have to look at a calendar to find out. As it turns out, this year September 1 is a Saturday. But last year it was a Thursday. The year before that, it was a Wednesday. Next year it will be on a Sunday. The last time that September 1^st was a Saturday was five years ago, and it will be another six years from now before we get Saturday the 1^st of September again.

This means that, if we were to be referring to dates within this ten year period, we could state “Saturday, the 1^st of September” and there would be no ambiguity as to which day we were talking about. We could technically do without including “2012”, because we wouldn't need to mention the year in order to differentiate that September 1^st from any of the others within that time period from 2008 to 2017. Simply combining the weekly with the monthly calendar does that.

The reason why we usually mention the year as well is because we often are working within periods of time much longer than just ten years. If we wanted to know when people first set foot on the moon, saying “Sunday, July 20th” isn't a big help. That could be fifty-three years ago. . .or ninety-three years ago, or seventy-five years ago, or one hundred years ago.

Instead, then, we might say that it was Sunday, 20 July, 1969 AD. Giving the year as well puts Sunday the 20^th of July firmly into a fixed place in a larger framework. There has only ever been one day with that particular combination of calendar dates, and there will be only one (we're leaving out such matters as different countries starting the calendar on different days and other such weirdness).

The week calendar is cyclic: it starts at Sunday, goes through to Saturday, and then cycles back to Sunday again. The month calender is doubly cyclic; not only does it go from 1 up to 28 to 31 and then back to 1 again, it also starts at January and goes through to December before coming back around to January. But is the year calendar also cyclic, or does it just keep going on in a straight line forever?

It's both. The number keeps on growing, never fully repeating. But there are cycles within the number.

The yearly calendar starts at the year 1 AD (there was no year 0). It then progresses on to 2 AD, then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and then 10. Let's look at the first year again, though. Writing it as “1” is how we usually do it, but because of the way our numbering system works it isn't really just a single digit all by itself. There is an implied series of infinite zeroes in front of that 1. We could, if we wanted to be really odd and yet still accurate, write the date of the first year as this:

00000000001 AD

This style of writing would make the first ten years of the calendar thus:

00000000001

00000000002

00000000003

00000000004

00000000005

00000000006

00000000007

00000000008

00000000009

00000000010

Now, we're all so accustomed to using numbers that we sometimes forget just how they work, even though we know full well how it does work. We use a positional numbering system, where the value of any particular digit in a number is based on how far to the left or right of other digits in that number it is. Looking at the list of ten years mentioned above, the first year and the last year in the list contain the exact same digits: ten 0's and one 1. But they don't have the same value, because the 1 in the last year is moved one place over to the left, giving us a ten instead of a one.

This is where the cycle fits in. The far right digit in each year of the progression cycles from 0 up to 9, and then goes back to 0 again. Each time that happens, the next digit over to the left increases by one, until that digit, too, has increased from 0 to 9. And then the second digit also cycles back to 0, while the third digit to the left increases by one. And so on. The total value of all of the digits increases by one each time without ever repeating, but the individual digits themselves are always going in cycles.

Why did I bring all of this up, when this is supposed to be about the Mayan calendar? Because the situation with the Mayan calendar is pretty much the same.

First, though, a quick warning. The Mayans didn't use a number system like ours. Where we have a base-ten system, the Mayans used a base-twenty. Where our numbers listed above repeat a cycle every ten intervals, the Mayans' would repeat every twenty. While writing out a base-twenty number system is actually rather simple and straight-forward, it is also tiresome and annoying to try to write out or read when you're also using the base-ten system that we're all familiar with. For this reason, I'm just going to keep using a base-ten number system in all of the examples of Mayan dates, even though the Mayans would have used a totally different system. It all works out the same for our purposes here, and is a lot easier to understand. I'm also going to leave out a whole lot of the other details of their calendars, because the Mayans really loved their cycles and calendars and they created approximately twenty-seven bajillion different ones. We'll just be looking at the four main ones that relate to the whole “the Mayan calendar is running out, we're all gonna die!!!!!!” phenomenon.

Just like we do, the Mayans also used multiple calendars in their daily life. But where we use the weekly or the monthly calendars, the Mayans used the tzolkin or haab calendars.

The tzolkin was a length of time corresponding to 260 days, each with its own name. The tzolkin can be thought of as being similar in concept to our week: it doesn't seem to really be based on anything other than the fact that the Mayans liked the number 260, and it was important for ceremonial functions such as placing the holy days in proper order. The days of the tzolkin were named in somewhat different manner than those of our week, though. While they were giving names such as deer, night, rain, or whatever, they were also numbered. They had twenty names and thirteen numbers, so you'd start off the tzolkin by having 1-crocodile followed by 1-wind followed by 1-night, and then when they'd gone through the twenty names they'd cycle back and go with 2-crocodile and then 2-wind and then 2-night. When they got up to 13-crocodile and 13-wind and so on and worked all the way through to the very last name on the list, then they'd start the next tzolkin and go back to 1-crocodile again.

If you went back in time, walked up to a Mayan priest, and asked him what day it was, he might therefore answer with 7-monkey, just as we might say that it was Wednesday.

The haab is more like our monthly calendar, in that it was based on actual astronomical cycles and was more useful for day-to-day keeping track of dates. It was the Mayans' attempt to match a calendar up to the yearly orbit of the Earth around the sun, and was 365 days long. It had a similar naming scheme as did the tzolkin, but instead of having thirteen cycles of twenty names it had eighteen cycles of twenty names (which gives only 360 named days; the remaining five were left unnamed and were considered to be very ill-omened).

So going back to our time-traveling conversation with the Mayan priest, he might instead give the date according to the haab calender and say that today was 17-bat, just as we might reply that it was May 14^th.

To be more specific about when in time an event occurred, though, the Mayans would often combine the two calendars together. Rather than just saying that it is 7-monkey or 17-bat, the priest might very well say that today is 7-monkey 17-bat. This is like when we said Saturday the 1^st of September; it differentiates that particular Saturday from others and that particular September the 1^st from others within a certain narrow timeframe. By combining the two calendars together like this, any day within a 18,980-day (just under 52 of our years) period would have its own unique combination name. There would be no other day called 7-monkey 17-bat for another fifty-two years, and there hadn't been one with that name since fifty-two years previously. This fifty-two year cycle is called a Calendar Round.

The combination Calendar Round date was fine for most day-to-day uses. If you said that your nephew was born on 2-rock 6-pointy-stick, then it would be obvious that this would be referring to the 2-rock 6-pointy-stick of a particular Calendar Round. If your nephew was still a young boy, then it wouldn't be the 2-rock 6-pointy-stick that happened sixty years ago, or the one happening forty-four years in the future.

But that wasn't quite good enough for other purposes. As with many other cultures, the Mayans liked to record historical events for posterity. These might be the rise and fall of kings, various battles, or astronomical data. When referring back to something back before common memory, such as the date when a king died nine generations ago, simply stating that he died on 3-ant 12-nut doesn't really help. 3-ant 12-nut of which Calendar Round? The one eight cycles ago? Nine cycles ago? Twenty cycles ago? A method of accurately fixing dates into an even longer framework was needed.

Thus the Long Count calendar was created. This is the particular calendar that has caused all the furor and panic, due to it “running out” this December.

Just like how our yearly calendar differs from the purely cyclic weekly and monthly ones by being both cyclic and linear at the same time, the Long Count calendar differs from the purely cyclic haabs, tzolkins and Calendar Rounds by being both cyclic and linear. In fact, the Long Count calendar functions in exactly the same way as does our yearly calendar, with the only difference being the Mayans' use of a base-twenty system.

As mentioned above, we could write our years as 00000000001, 00000000002, and so on. It is the position of the digit within the number, not just the value of the digit itself, that tells us the value of the number. Which is why 00000000010 has a higher value than does 00000000009, even though 9 is more than 1.

Because the Mayans used the base-twenty system rather than a base-ten system, it's a bit tricky to write out Long Count dates in the same way that we write out our years. We're fine counting up the Mayan dates up to the point of 00000000009, but then we're stuck. According to our system, the next number in the sequence ought to be 00000000010, with the digits in the tens place coming into play. But in the Mayan system, we're only halfway through the digits in the ones place and the tens place will have to sit and wait for awhile. We can't write that out using our numbers. And so we cheat a bit.

What we do is we write out the dates with spaces marked between each digit. This would be like writing 00000000001 as 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1; the marks between each digit aren't actually part of the overall number, they're just marking the space between the different places. So the Mayan Long Count's progression would be written something like this:

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.2

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.3

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.4

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.5

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.6

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.8

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.9

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.10

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.11

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.12

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.13

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.14

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.15

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.16

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.17

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.18

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.19

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.0

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.1

0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.2

This lets us write out a year using out ten-digit number system, when the year is meant to be written using a twenty-digit system. It works in the exact same way as with our own system, with each place progressively “filling up” until it cycles back to 0 and the next place over to the left gets increased by one.

In math class, we learned the names of the different digit places in a number. Given the number 849723, for example, we know that the digit 3 is in the ones place, 2 is in the tens place, 7 is in the hundreds place, and so on. For our year 2012, we have a 2 in the ones place, a 1 in the tens, 0 in the hundreds, and another 2 in the thousands.

That doesn't work for describing the date in the Mayan Long Count, though, because the numbers are different. So we use the Mayans' own names for the different places in their dates. For the Mayan date 4.12.6.8.15.7.11.8.16, for example, we'd say that there is a 16 in the kin place, 8 in the uinal place, 11 in the tun place, 7 in the katun place, and so on. The first six places in a Mayan Long Count date are as follows:

pictun.baktun.katun.tun.uinal.kin

(The above is all actually slightly simplified from how it really works. The Mayans decided to complicate things in a couple of ways. First, the digits in the kin position, representing the smallest units counted, actually start at the number 13. It's sort of like if we decided that in our years the number in the ones place always started at 4, thus meaning that the years progressed as 1998, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2014, etc. Also, they decided that the uinal place—and only the uinal place--in the date should be base-eighteen rather than base-twenty. We have no idea why they did any of this; probably just to mess with future archaeologists.)

That's the Long Count calendar. Each kin is one day, each uinal is seven kins (thanks to Mayan weirdness), each tun is eighteen uinals (again thanks to Mayan weirdness), and then each of the rest is 20 of the unit immediately preceding it.

So, what's happening with the Long Count this year? Why is it “running out”? Well, the Long Count date on the 21^st of December will change from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.13. The first four places in the date will be filled up, so they'll cycle back around to zeros (and 13 for the weird kin one) while the digit in the baktun position will increase by one to 13. That's it. The baktun position has increased by one a dozen times already, and still has seven more increases to go before it itself cycles back to zero. This is nothing new, really.

Furthermore, the Mayans created a further eighteen positions in the calendar after the pictun position. Meaning that there are nineteen positions in the Long Count calendar that haven't even been touched yet. Rather than running out, the Mayan Long Count calendar has barely even gotten started. It will be over 2,500 years before we even start on the pictuns. The Mayan Calendar isn't running out in 2012. At the very earliest, it will run out sometime around the year 41341050000000000000000000000 AD.

Added to this is that the Mayans themselves made lots of predictions of the future. Much of the fuss about 2012 is from a partial inscription mentioning the start of the 13^th baktun and. . .something. The inscription is damaged where the description of what will happen was engraved, meaning that we can't really tell what was predicted. But various people have declared that it must be horrible and ominous and world-ending, because. . .ummmm. . .just because. However, this overlooks the fact that there are large numbers of intact Mayan inscriptions that go on to predict events ranging from dates several centuries ago to about seven thousand years in the future, and none of them mention any little details such as the end of the world. Instead, they indicate Mayan society continuing on for millennia in exactly the same way as it had been. Which not only argues against the alarmist interpretation of the partial inscription prophesying about the 13^th baktun, but also argues rather well against Mayan prophetic powers in general.