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

      Tell me about it. I'm having a crisis of heterosexuality because I can't identify any heterosexual culture that isn't just sketchy patriarchal bullshit, but I'm still cis and heterosexual so I can't really go in to queer spaces, so I'm just stuck here in Limbo hanging out with Plato and the other virtuous pagans. It's awkward. And Plato cheats at cards.

      Seriously though there are a bunch of different queer subcultures and a lot of them are focused on justice, breaking down the violence of cisheteropatriarchical norms, all that good shit. If you're heterosexual you maybe know some cool feminists if you're lucky, and other than that you can either find queer friends who tolerate you, or just stare bleakly at the chemical swamp pit that is heterosexual normative behavior. I do not like it, but I am only one man and I can only raise the expectations of so many heterosexual woman regarding how they should be treated in relationships even if those relationships don't work out.

      Seriously it is so fucking haunting when you realize your girlfriend is being weird and squirrely because she expects you to treat her like other men have treated her in the past and then you think about what those men must have done and it's just like "Wow I am going to check out and stare at the wall for a few minutes in a mildly traumatized fashion trying to think about what to do next" and the answer is often to try fumblingly to be a therapist and a boyfriend at the same time, but that's pretty much impossible and never works out well because you've still got all the problems two people have when they're trying to relate to each other, not to mention all my own traumas and bullshit.

      It's fucking bleak out there.

      : |

      Like this is arrogant or whatever but I sincerely believe I've had a couple of breakups because the woman I was dating couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance of being treated like a person when few if any of her previous boyfriends had ever done that, and it was just so weird they couldn't make sense of the experience and left.

      Knowing your partner is in pain because something you did reminded her of those men but you don't know what happened because you're not like those men and can't imagine what they would have done, but you're sitting there looking at the old wounds still bleeding, is one of the most helpless and isolating things I have ever experienced.