For BCE dates enter a negative year number. It tells us about the relationship among all things, including the animals, the land, humans, and everything in the cosmos. Initial Series Introductory Glyph: This symbol identifies this date as belonging to the Long Count system.

What is the Long Count?

Lord of the Night G8 in this example: A glyph that represents one the nine deities of the Maya Underworld. Skip to main content. Lord of the Night: Reading the Maya Calendar The Maya calendar system records a series of recurring cycles of time based on the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. There is a great deal of nonsense that has been written about the Mayan long count.

It has been claimed most egregiously, in a Discovery Channel TV series that it will 'come to an end' in the near future, and along with it will arrive a Mayan apocalypse, a pole shift, earth change, cosmic convergence, whatever.

Given the completely cyclic nature of the long count, this is an idiotic characterization. Once any given cycle ends, another begins, endlessly. The full long count is currently only at baktun 12; there are still 8 baktuns or about three thousand years before it turns over.

The current Katun will increment about ten years from now However, there is no reason that date should be any more cosmologically significant than the end of the common era millenium was! For one thing, this is a theoretical reconstruction of the Mayan calendar, since it hasn't been in use for hundreds of years.

The Mayan epoch shown above was hotly debated by archeologists for many decades. The date shown is a consensus date, originally proposed by J. Thompson, and supported by carbon dating and other methods.

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However, this particular date for the Mayan epoch could still be off by some amount, possibly by years. Thus any eschatological theories based on this calendar would have to be adjusted accordingly.

This is similar to the Christian era, which may be off by several years since we don't have Jesus' birth certificate in hand; so any predictions of the end of the world based on when that calendar ticks over were just as absurd. Furthermore, the assumption that some occurance of the Christian millenium marks the expiration date of the Universe is based on base 10 math: And anyway, last time I checked, the date is now and counting, and the universe is still here The zero day of the Mayan calendar is the date given above as the 'Mayan Epoch'.

The significance of this particular date, which far exceeds any known historical horizon for Mayan civilization, is unknown. No recorded Mayan date preceeds baktun 7, and most of the historical Mayan events occurred during baktun 9 from C.

A page from the "Calendars" exhibit...

Even longer dates with more components have been found. This includes enough additional base 20 components to write dates millions of years in the past or future, even though no such dates actually occur in the Mayan inscriptions, just contemporary dates with more digits in front of them.

Imagining that kind of chronological depth to the universe is another Mayan accomplishment, similar to Hindu and Buddhist chronologies which encompass not just millenia, but billions of years of cosmic history. Each Haab date consists of a one of twenty day numbers, numbered from 0 to 19 , and a 'month' or uinal name, of which there are The uinal names are as follows: Five days were added at the end of the year: