by Stephanie Harwood

Created on: July 23, 2009

On December 21, 2012, the current Mayan Long Count calendar will end its 5,125-year cycle and, ancient Mayans believed, a new cycle will begin. But there are those who believe the Mayans predicted otherwise and that on that December date all cycles will end - and so will we.

The Long Count itself is not a curse, but a mental machine, wheels within wheels of marking time, on a base-20 or vigesimal sequence, which scholars have deciphered and correlated with the Gregorian calendar to arrive at a start date of 3114 B.C. for the current cycle.

It incorporates the 52-year Calendar Round, an amalgamation itself of two smaller calendars (the 260-day tonalamatl and the 365-day haab) and something that archaeologist Sylvanus Griswold Morley in his An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs thought of as an eternally revolving cogwheel with 18,980 teeth in it (365 days x 52) that passed a fixed point once every 52 years. The basic unit was the day, or kin, of which there were twenty, beginning with Imix, followed by Ik and ending with Ahau:

Imix

Chuen

Ik

Eb

Akbal

Ben

Ran

Ix

Chiechan

Men

Cimi

Cib

Manik

Caban

Lamat

Eznab

Mulue

Cauac

Oc

Ahau

These taken together formed a uinal, which rolled up into larger units:

1 kin

=

1 day

20 kins

=

1 uinal

=

20 days

18 uinals

=

1 tun

=

360 days (a closing period of five "days without name" followed, to create the haab, or 365-day year)

20 tuns

=

1 katun

=

7,200 days

20 katuns

=

1 cycle

=

144,000 days

20 cycles

=

1 great cycle

=

2,880,000 days

Since the Calendar Round marked the position of a given day within a 52-year timeframe, something had to be developed to distinguish one Calendar Round from another, in order to distinguish one kin from another over long periods of time. (For instance, we know that Wednesday, July 22, 2009 is different than Wednesday, July 23, 2008.) The solution the Mayans found was the Long Count, which put each day in its proper place within the approximately 5,125-year cycle.

What emerges from all the hieroglyphics is a detailed and mathematically accurate method of tracking time, and its hallmark was

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