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.

The Mesoamerican Calendar - Ancient Americas 84

The Mayan Calendar countdown

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

Theory:

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The aesthetic of barging in on someone else’s community space isn’t a good look (by default)

      Hexbear and Lemmygrad are free territory, lemmy.ml is neutral ground, but smaller instances like the star trek one won’t appreciate a 500 comment struggle session out of nowhere

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Plus it’s just boorish. Jumping in to another instance, vomitting out a hot take, and then screaming “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” in the comments isn’t fun anymore. I’m old. I can’t post a two page diatribe in response to every one of hundreds of comments calling me a tankie anymore. THat’s a young posters game.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      It’s not about optics, it’s about being good neighbors. The goal is to lure them in to our trap and then devour them, and to do that we need to trick the admins of the other instances in to thinking we’re hinged, reasonable people who can be trusted with federation.

      You catch more flies with deceit and backstabbing than with overt frontal assaults.