Earlier today (January 12th, 2003) I was having a discussion with a friend where the Mayan calendar was mentioned and I stated that today’s date is 2 Muan 13 Muluc but my friend countered with today being 5 Lamat 6 Yax. To further muddy the waters I tried a program called mdate which gave a date of 12 Eb 0 Muan.
Is modern man just guessing at what the possible date may be with the Mayan calendar? Who is more wrong? I don’t understand the discrepancy.
Hopefully this topic isn’t entirely obscure.
I’m probably going to stick with the Discordian calendar.
Boomtime, Chaos the 12th, 3169
Interesting. I was going to recommend the book Calendrical Calculations by Nachum Dershowitz and Edward Reingold, but in following the mdate link I see that that’s actually what the program is based on. Anyway, in the book’s chapter on Mayan calendars (that’s right, it’s a plural, so there’s a hint), the authors say:
I see that mdate converts to long count dates; however, the book gives these dates in the form of 0.0.0.0.0, where the units are[ul]1 kin = 1 day
1 uinal = 20 kin
1 tun = 18 uinal
1 katun = 20 tun
1 baktun = 20 katun[/ul]starting with baktun as the leftmost unit.
Uh, so how did mdate come up with 12 Eb 0 Muan? Well, the long count is just a strict counting of days from the beginning of a cycle (each cycle is about 7885 solar years, and, according to the most widely accepted correlation, started August 11, 3114 B.C.E. in the Gregorian calendar), and the authors supply algorithms for converting it into a date in either the haab or tzolkin calendars, and my guess is that that’s what mdate did (no, I’m not going to do the calculations to verify that). Just as a bit of side information, the haab is the civil calendar, based approximately on the solar year of 365 days, and made up of 18 “months” of 20 days each, plus 5 extra days at the end. The tzolkin is the religious calendar consisting of a 13-day count and 20 periods, which cycle simultaneously to form 260 unique dates for a divine year.
Confused yet? There’s more:
And, as if that’s not bad enough:
The calendar round date is the one that you originally used. I don’t know where your friend’s date came from, other than perhaps a conversion from long count into the other of the haab or tzolkin calendars.
If you’re interested, you may want to check out the authors’ own web site and click on the “Calendrica 2.0” link to see dates shown in multiple calendar systems.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on either Mayan history or calendrical conversions, though I do have an amateur’s interest in both (some of the former, more of the latter). Everything I’ve posted here comes from picking and sorting through Dershowitz and Reingold’s book, and if/when someone more knowledgeable comes along, I will defer to that person.
I defer to Earthling.
But how fortunate you chose to post right now.
I ran across the Goodman correlation that was done in 1905 that gave the Mayan zero on the long count to be 13 August 3114 BCE in our Gregorian calendar. This same correlation places the end of the current ‘great cycle’ as 23 December 2012 AD.
Would this hold up with the later calculations? If so, it seems like another potential Y2K hoax area.
Oh, the final month of 5 days was called Uayeb, I believe.
Uayeb is correct.
Dershowitz and Reingold used the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation, which their bibliography lists as being published in 1971, so that may account for the slightly different starting date of the current cycle. Regarding the “end date,” however, I flipped through my other books and found:
Eh, glad to see everyone cashing in on Y2K there, and there’s probably at least a bit of gleeful apocalyptic sensationalism in pointing out our imminent demise. But still, two of my books say 5130 years per Great Cycle, and two say 7885 years (and didn’t give it a name), so there is apparently some disagreement amongst the scholars on the length of the Mayan calendar. Another possibility is that the books are all in agreement but had somehow failed to address the use of both cycles by the Mayans, but I doubt that’s the case. Not surprisingly, a Google search proved inconclusive.
So, any experts out there?
I just happen to have this year’s copy of the Mayan Calendar (www.mayan-calendar.com), and it lists January 12 as 11 Manik’ Seating Muwan.
You calendar fans might want to check out this website. it has a number of different calendar calculators…including Mayan.
After some additional thought, I realized what is meant by “a popular way for the Mayans to specify a date was to use the haab and tzolkin dates together” is to display them as a pair, usually in the form of haab-date tzolkin-date. So, for example, “2 Muan” is the haab part of the pair, and “13 Muluc” is the tzokin part. Duh, yeah, I was too dense to figure that out on my initial post, and what I said about converting long count to either system being the cause of the discrepancies is a load of hooey. Sorry.
So, going back and looking at the differing dates again, we (now) know that there are a couple of factors to consider:[ul][li]Different start dates. Dershowitz and Reingold use August 11, -3113 (for ease of computation, this is the actual number they showed in their book, which I then converted to B.C.E.), and others use August 13.[/li][li]Giving the start date in the form of the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian one (as above). In this form, the current Mayan calendar cycle started on either September 6 or 8, 3114 B.C.E., depending on which correlation one adheres to.[/li][li]Year 0 doesn’t exist.[/ul]Then, putting these considerations into a matrix of possible dates. Using Dershowitz and Reingold’s Calendrica program as the baseline, we get:[ul]raisinbread: 2 Muan 13 Muluc = 2003 Jan. 12[/li]Calendrica: Matches.
[li]ratatoskK: 0 Muan 11 Manik = 2003 Jan. 12 (I’m assuming 0 = Seating)[/li]Calendrica: 0 Muan 11 Manik = 2003 Jan. 10
[li]mdate: 0 Muan 12 Eb = 2003 Jan. 12[/li]Calendrica: 0 Muan 12 Eb = 2004 Jan. 10[/ul]The difference between raisinbread and ratatoskK’s dates is simply the two-day difference in start dates, which (to me as a layperson anyway) is no cause for great concern, especially considering how far back it goes. Now, mdate, however, doesn’t just start on a different day, it’s also off by one year, which tells me that the program’s writers ignored the Year 0 issue and made the mistake of equating Year -3113 to 3113 B.C.E… Maybe someone should drop these guys a note?
Even after this exercise, however, I still can’t figure out where 6 Yax 5 Lamat (the OP’s friend’s date, using the haab-tzolkin order) came from. Perhaps we can get some clarification?
On a tangential note, tzolkin cycles start with Day 1, whereas the first day of a haab cycle is 0. I don’t know why this internal (to Mayans) inconsistency exists.
Well, looks like I’m pretty much monopolizing this thread, so I’ll shut up for now.