Skip to main content Skip to table of contents. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Editors: Helaine Selin. Contents Search. Calendars in Mesoamerica. Authors Authors and affiliations Tom Jones. How to cite. The correlation of Maya dates The Solar Round. Combining and Creating a Calendar.
Kris Hirst. Archaeology Expert. Kris Hirst is an archaeologist with 30 years of field experience. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications such as Archaeology Online and Science. Twitter Twitter. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Hirst, K. Mesoamerican Calendar. Cultures Rise and Fall on the Mesoamerica Timeline. Tlaloc the Aztec God of Rain and Fertility. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for ThoughtCo. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
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Each glyph represents a personality associated with the month. The Haab is somewhat inaccurate as it is exactly days long. An actual tropical or solar year , the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, takes about It is a day calendar with 20 periods of 13 days, and it is used to determine the time of religious and ceremonial events.
The days in each period are numbered from 1 to Each day is also given a name glyph from a sequence of 20 day names. The Long Count is an astronomical calendar which is used to track longer periods of time. The Mayans believed that the universe is destroyed and then recreated at the start of each universal cycle. This belief caused the phenomenon described above, and it still inspires a myriad of prophecies about the end of the world. The unlucky five-day period was known as uayeb , and was considered an ominous time which could precipitate danger, death and bad luck.
The Maya solar new year is thought to have begun sometime in our present-day month of July, with the Maya month of Pop. The Maya day month always begins with the seating of the month, followed by days numbered 1 to 19, then the seating of the following month, and so on. This ties in with the Maya notion that each month influences the next. Thus, the Maya new year would start with 1 Pop, followed by 2 Pop, all the way through to 19 Pop, followed by the seating of the month of Uo, written as 0 Uo, then 1 Uo, 2 Uo, etc.
The linking of the tzolkin and the haab resulted in a longer cycle of 18, days, or approximately 52 solar years. The end of this year cycle was particularly feared, because it was believed to be a time when the world might come to an end and the sky might fall, if the gods were not satisfied with the way humanity had carried out its obligations. The year cycle was inadequate, however, to measure the continual passage of time through the ages.
Another calendar was thus devised, called the Long Count. The Long Count was based on the following units of time: a kin one day ; a uinal a month of 20 kins ; a tun a year of kins or 18 uinals ; a katun 20 tuns ; a baktun 20 katuns , or years.
Larger units included the pictun , the calabtun , the kinchiltun and the analtun. Each analtun was equivalent to 64 million years. The Long Count starts from the beginning of the current creation cycle, and corresponds to the present age. The date of this creation is set at either B.
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