Our End of the World parties might be a good time to recall the downfall of the Maya and all indigenous peoples began a little more than a baktun ago. Great calendars and astronomical observations just don’t stand a chance against a brutal man with a gun. Perhaps the NRA will back an expedition to go back in time and arm the Maya.
I found the entire “end of the world” hubbub irritating. Did Y2K teach us nothing? How could anyone believe or even wonder if this would be the end of the world. Puh-lease.
The Mayans and mesoamericans were phenomenally time obsessed. Europeans, on the other hand, have been pathetically sloppy with time-keeping. Sure, we have nanotime now, but it was just a few hundred years ago that time skipped 11 days in part of the western world but not all of it (*). We’ve flopped all over the place with calendars determined by the fiat of emperors and popes. Leap Year (except every 20 years except every 100 years except every 400 years); “30 days hath September…”; spring back, leap forward; a hodgepodge of day and month names: Wednesday (even Germans favor a more logical Midweek), February? Could our calendar be any more comical? We might as well add dog years to the discussion.
I have ZERO faith in any conversion between calendars. Time gives us illusions of both precision (which has sharpened) and accuracy (relative to what/when?). So, we foolishly say the Mayan calendar ends 12-21-12 and compound the nonsense by wondering what timezone that applies to.
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Long Count periods
The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from a starting date that is generally calculated to be August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar (or ?3113 in astronomical year numbering). There has been much debate over the precise correlation between the Western calendars and the Long Count calendars. The August 11 date is based on the GMT correlation (see Correlations between Western calendars and the Long Count calendar section elsewhere in this article for details on correlations).
The completion of 13 b’ak’tuns (August 11, 3114 BCE) marks the Creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya. On this day, Raised-up-Sky-Lord caused three stones to be set by associated gods at Lying-Down-Sky, First-Three-Stone-Place. Because the sky still lay on the primordial sea, it was black. The setting of the three stones centered the cosmos which allowed the sky to be raised, revealing the sun.[1]
Rather than using a base-10 scheme, like Western numbering, the Long Count days were tallied in a modified base-20 scheme. Thus 0.0.0.1.5 is equal to 25, and 0.0.0.2.0 is equal to 40. The Long Count is not pure base-20, however, since the second digit from the right rolls over to zero when it reaches 18. Thus 0.0.1.0.0 does not represent 400 days, but rather only 360 days.
Note that the name b’ak’tun is a back-formation invented by scholars. The numbered Long Count was no longer in use by the time the Spanish arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula, although unnumbered k’atuns and tuns were still in use. Instead the Maya were using an abbreviated Short Count.
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
More than 30 years ago, my Droog, John Merck, suggested we celebrate the end of the Mayan calendar. Not as farsighted as the Maya, but way ahead of the herd.