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The Enigmatic Mayan Calendar
An overview of how the Maya calendar worked: the 260-day count, the 365-day year, the 52-year Calendar Round and the Long Count, and how they fit together.
The Americas
How the Maya counted time, wrote and understood the cosmos.
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An overview of how the Maya calendar worked: the 260-day count, the 365-day year, the 52-year Calendar Round and the Long Count, and how they fit together.
The Maya calendar did not predict the future, but day-keepers used the 260-day count for divination and naming. Here is how that worked and what the 2012 story got wrong.
How Long Count dates carved on Maya stelae and monuments let historians fix the reigns, wars and ceremonies of rulers, with worked examples from Pakal and Tikal.
How the Maya understood time as cycles tied to the sky, the four directions and the underworld, and why days and places were seen as parts of one ordered world.
How the 52-year Calendar Round works, how day names and numbers combine, and how scholars worked out the correlation between Maya dates and our own calendar.
What the Long Count date of 21 December 2012 really marked: the end of a period and the start of a new cycle, not an apocalypse. How the doomsday story arose.
An introduction to major Maya gods such as the maize god and Itzamna, their roles in myth and the Popol Vuh, and the rituals that honoured them.
How Maya glyphs were read, from Landa's misunderstood alphabet and early guesses to Knorozov's phonetic breakthrough and the modern reading of royal histories.
A practical guide to the 260-day Maya count: its twenty day names, thirteen numbers, how to read a date such as 4 Ajaw, and why the count mattered.
The astronomy hidden in the Maya calendar: the Dresden Codex Venus and eclipse tables, how they work, and the correlation question that ties Maya dates to ours.
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