The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating base-20 and base-18 calendar used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is often known as the Maya Long Count calendar. Using a modified vigesimal tally, the Long Count calendar identifies a day by counting the number of days passed since a mythical creation date that corresponds to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The Long Count calendar was widely used on monuments.

Background

The two most widely used calendars in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were the 260-day Tzolkʼin and the 365-day Haabʼ. The equivalent Aztec calendars are known in Nahuatl as the Tonalpohualli and Xiuhpohualli.

The combination of a Haabʼ and a Tzolkʼin date identifies a day in a combination which does not occur again for 18,980 days (52 Haabʼ cycles of 365 days equals 73 Tzolkʼin cycles of 260 days, approximately 52 years), a period known as the Calendar Round. To identify days over periods longer than this, Mesoamericans used the Long Count calendar.

The Long Count calendar is divided into five distinct units:

  • one day - kin
  • 20 days - uinal
  • 360 days - tun
  • 7,200 days - katun
  • 144,000 days - baktun

Mesoamerican numerals

Long Count dates are written with Mesoamerican numerals, as shown on this table. A dot represents 1 while a bar equals 5. The shell glyph was used to represent the zero concept. The Long Count calendar required the use of zero as a place-holder and presents one of the earliest uses of the zero concept in history.

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The Mesoamerican Calendar - Ancient Americas 84

The Mayan Calendar countdown

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  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I was just thinking about how impossible it is to hold on to a nuanced view in politics. Generally speaking "The Discourse" is so divorced from any kind of reality that you're not really arguing about anything that really exists or is happening, you're arguing with someone about which groups and identities they assume. China and Russia aren't real places to most libs, they're just a hazy cloud of ideas that they project on to the "bad guys". So trying to argue from history or policy or anything concrete is pointless. They neither know nor care what you're talking about, they just see someone attacking them on behalf of the bad guys and lose their shit or start dropping thought terminating cliches.

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