To read any Maya date one must first understand their numerical system. Unlike the ten Arabic symbols we use (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) the Maya employed just three symbols: a dot for one, a bar for five, and one of three different signs for zero. Individual dots were arranged to make the numbers one to four, swapping to a single bar for five. Thereafter dots and bars were combined to represent all the numbers up to 19, which was formed from three bars and four dots (a looped design often fills empty spaces but has no value). The sequence runs from 0 to 19 because the Maya system was vigesimal, which is to say that it worked in Base Twenty rather than the Base Ten of our own decimal system (the Babylonians, by contrast, used Base Sixty). Numbers of 20 and above were created with a place notation system—in much the same way we write “10” by shifting 1 up by an order of magnitude (1 x 10) and following it by zero. To write “20” the Maya would use a dot (1 x 20) followed by a zero sign.
A variant of place notation was used to create the huge numbers recorded in the Maya calendar we call the Long Count — the system responsible for all the interest in 2012. The Long Count is a cumulative count of days that ascends in magnitude from single days, to units of 20 days, 360 days, 7,200 days (about 20 years), and 144,000 days (about 400 years). Today we call these units K’in, Winal, Tun, K’atun, and Bak’tun. They all work in Base Twenty except the Winal that, confusingly, works in Base Eighteen (probably in order to approximate the 365.2422 days of the solar year). Each of them has its own hieroglyph that, in another layer of complexity, appears in at least two different forms, sometimes more. Today we represent them in Arabic numerals separated by periods. I am writing this description on April 28, 2011, which is equivalent to the Long Count 12.19.18.5.15 (which is to say, 12 Bak’tun, 19 K’atun, 18 Tun, 5 Winal, 15 K’in). This represents the number of days that have elapsed since August 13, 3114 BCE.
But this is not the beginning of the Long Count, since these five commonly seen place notations are only a tiny fraction of the full system. We have texts that record no less than 19 named positions above that of the Bak’tun. This puts the true starting point of the calendar many trillions of years in the past, making it far, far older than the current universe! There was, nevertheless, a special quality to the 3114 BCE date, since the Bak’tun and all higher positions were set to the magical number “13”—doubtless reflecting the Mayas’ belief that they lived in an exceptional era.
The Long Count was the grandest conception of time used by the Maya, but far from the only one and others rivalled it in importance. The first of these is called the Sacred Round (or Tzolk’in), a system that combines 20 named days with 13 numbers. As each day in this calendar advances to the next, so does its accompanying number. Thus 1 Imix is followed by 2 Ik’, 3 Ak’bal, 4 K’an, and so on until reaching 13 Ben, after which the numbers return to 1 while the day names continue, with 1 Ix, 2 Men, and so forth. It takes 260 days for the days and numbers to come back into alignment and for 1 Imix to repeat itself. This system survives to this day in some isolated parts of the Maya area, where it is used for divination and the timing of certain ceremonies. Another calendar is called the Vague Year (or Haab) and is based on the solar year. This system features 18 named months of 20 days each and an additional short month of five days, together totaling 365 days. The Vague Year gets its name because it is .2422 days short of the true solar year and there – fore slowly slips against the seasons. The Vague Year begins on 0 Pop and progresses through 1 Pop, 2 Pop, 3 Pop, and so forth through each month in turn, finishing with 4 Wayeb, the last day in the short month at the end of the year.
The Sacred Round and Vague Year are joined to form the Calendar Round, in which no combination will repeat for 18,980 days or about 52 solar years. On April 28, 2011, the Sacred Round was 10 Men and the Vague Year 3 Wo—a Calendar Round pairing that will not occur again until April 15, 2063. Although there is no reason to think that the Maya ever assembled a clock-like mechanism to display their calendars, a series of intermeshing cogwheels is a useful way for us to conceive how the system worked.
The Long Count fell into decline after the fall of the great Classic-period kingdoms between 800 and 900 CE, but survived in a pared-down form called the Short Count. This identified each successive K’atun by the Sacred Round on which it ended, all automatically falling on the day Ajaw “Lord—following a fixed sequence of 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and finally 13 Ajaw. The total span of the Short Count was 13 K’atun or about 256 solar years, and when added to a Calendar Round date could specify an individual day within that span—adequate for most historical purposes.
We have by no means exhausted the Maya’s calendrical ingenuity, since there were a range of lunar reckonings and other notations devoted to more purely mystical cycles. The typical stela inscription opens with large introductory hieroglyph followed by the appropriate Long Count, Sacred Round, and Vague Year, but further fixes the day within six, seven, or more alternative systems of accounting time. For a day to be properly commemorated it was necessary to know its place within multiple dimensions of time and acknowledge all the deities that presided over them.