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The Long Count Calendar

The Long Count Calendar

Mayan calendar column
Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
A Mayan calendar column was found in Quirigua, Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, on August 13, 1929.

Unfortunately, the Long Count calendar isn't as simple as combining two calendars together to get new dates. It'­s a little more complicated and abstract. In order to understand the Long Count, you first need to become familiar with a few terms:

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

The span of the Long Count calendar is called the Great Cycle, and lasts approximately 5,125.36 years [source: Jenkins]. To find the Lon­g Count date that corresponds with any Gregorian date, you'll need to count the days from the beginning of the last Great Cycle. But determining when the last cycle began and matching that up to a Gregorian date is quite a feat. English anthropologist Sir Eric Thompson set out to determine the date, and he looked to the Spanish Inquisition for help.

Mayan pyramid
Roberto Vannucci/Dreamstime.com
The Mayan pyramid in Chichen Itza was a physical calendar. Each side has a staircase with 91 steps and a platform, for a total of 365 steps. The dates inscribed into the pyramids all were written in the Long Count format.
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What transpired was known as the Thompson Correlation. Events that occurred during the Inquisition were recorded on both the Mayan Long Count calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Scholars then gathered dates that matched on both calendars and compared them to the Dresden Codex, one of four Mayan documents that survived the Inquisition. This codex confirmed the date long thought by Thompson to be the beginning of the current Great Cycle -- August 13, 3114 B.C. [source: Mayan Long Count].

Now that we have the beginning date of the Great Cycle, let's put the Long Count into practice. We'll take a date that's familiar to many Americans -- July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon. In the Long Count calendar, this date is written as 12.17.15.17.0 . You'll notice there are five number places in the date. Reading from left to right, the first place signifies the number of baktuns since the beginning of the Great Cycle. In this case, there have been 12 baktuns, or 1,728,000 days (144,000 x 12) since August 13, 3114. The second place relates to the number of katuns that have taken place. Then it continues on to the right with the number of tuns, uinals and kins.

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