Jessica Crabtree

August 11, 3,114 BC: Beginning of the Long Count in the Mayan calendar

It seems everyone knows that the Mayan calendar is supposed to end in 2012. But the day it begins doesn’t get quite so much publicity.

Actually, both terms are something of a misnomer – the Mayan calendar doesn’t end, and doesn’t begin. The Western idea of time is quite linear compared with many of the world’s other systems of time keeping, which like the Mayan calendar move in a circle.

The Mayan calendar, or more properly the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, was used in various forms throughout Central America, including by the Aztec. Its unique counting system is based on 20 and 18, rather than 10 or 60, making it a challenge for many scholars to decipher.

WebExhibits: Calendars Through the Ages THE MAYAN CALENDAR

But even the term “calendar” itself is a little misleading, because what lay persons are actually referring to is a specific unit in this system known as the Long Count – a recurring period of approximately 5,125 years. It’s the current “great cycle” that ends in 2012 – not the calendar.

Each great cycle in the Long Count contains 13 baktuns, just as a year in our calendar contains 12 months. The winter solstice of 2012 will mark the end of this Long Count’s 13th baktun, and the beginning of the 14th. According to the Mayan calendar, that means we’ll be entering a new great cycle.

Why 5,125 years?

The Maya standardized the units of time for their calendar sometime in the 2nd century, when the early classical Mayan empire was at its height, in order to reflect the “revised history” of the empire, its creation, and its ruling dynasties. In other words, it was history in retrospect, because in the Mayan worldview, the cosmos revolved around their empire. They incorporated their vast knowledge of astronomy to bolster this worldview.

Many people have noticed that several ancient calendars begin close the same period – the Chinese, Hindu, and the biblical Hebrew calendar, among others. The end of the 3rd millennium BC also witnessed the start of construction on timekeeping monuments such as Stonehenge. This time in history marked a period immediately following dramatic environmental changes that turned the page on civilizations across the world. Apparently these changes were so significant that in some cases they marked that starting point of these early civilizations’ record of time.

The difference with the Mayan calendar, as with the Hindu, is that it does not begin with its current cycle; it actually records time much, much further back. And when one cycle ends it simply starts a new one, just as we would turn a century or a millennium. This misunderstanding is the partly the basis of the popular “Mayan doomsday hypothesis,” despite the fact that it doesn’t “end” in 2012 at all – it simply starts a new cycle of baktuns.

Apocalypse Soon? What the Maya calendar really tells us about 2012 and the end of time
by Anthony Aveni Archaeology.com

National Geographic: 2012 Countdown to Armageddon

Tulane University: The Sky is Not Falling

Wikipedia: 2012 Phenomenon

Even so, the 2012 Mayan doomsday prophecy is a popular topic these days, from old-fashioned diner gossip to New Age gurus to street prophets in the Bronx ranting about the end of the world.

Many people expect a planetary alignment within our solar system to work like some kind of cosmic combination lock, unleashing a wave of “higher energy” that will usher in a new era of existence (although, as historical and astronomical records can easily attest, planets line up all the time with no discernable effect on the earth — that is, outside of the hype generated by astrologers and wannabe mystics).

Yet others foresee in the Mayan calendar a dire prediction of a massive solar burst that will occur that fateful Christmas week, crippling our global infrastructure and invoking worldwide chaos.

But thinking that the start of a new cycle in the ancient Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 means the end of our world is about as logical as a modern person dreading the Ides of March because the Roman Empire fell.

“From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end. ”

    G. K. Chesterton

NatGeo Special Feature: Maya Rise and Fall
Saga of a civilization in three parts: The rise, the monumental splendor, and the collapse.