Nice report, Dex, but I recall that the longest unit in the Long Count calendar is the Alautun, which represents 23,040,000,000 days, or approximately 63 million years, so the Count will not fully cycle for a while yet.
Also, it is interesting to note that the Mayans frequently specified dates using both the Haab and Tzolkin calendars, and dates of this form repeat only every 52 solar years. Thus, there was little ambiguity in a specific date.
Cite: I rembered the generalities from reading (the appendix to) 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and I got the specifics from here: 404
You certainly tried to get at it, but you never quite said it:
To the Mayans, 2012 is not the end of the world, it is the end of an epoch. It is the marker of significant change, more like then end of a beginning or the beginning of the end.
I didn’t like, however, how you implied that the Mayans might have thought it was a trivial curiousity that didn’t mean anything at all. They certainly didn’t think so.
Fun fact: the Mayas started all their date counting from 0, not 1. (Like the way programmers and mathematicians do their counting.) This was more convenient, more natural, and left no room for dumb arguments such as whether the millenium would start in 2000 or 2001.
nitpick: The society is called the Maya, not the Mayans, or the Mayas. Things of or related to the Maya is also simply Maya, like Maya civilization or Maya artifacts. Mayan should only be used in referring to the language.
The 10 Tevet fast remembers the date Babylon laid siege on Jerusalem. The siege would prove effective, leading to the destruction of the great temple and an exile of the Jewish people to Babylon that would last 70 years.
The long count never rolls over. The alautun is not the longest period possible, it’s just the largest name (the way ‘quadrillion’ is not the largest number).
The point isn’t actually so much the roll over itself. The staff report totally missed this, but the significance of the passage of 13 baktuns is that it’s how long the previous creation lasted. OTOH, the previous set of humans were crappy and were destroyed to be replaced by us, and supposedly we’re doing better. In any case, 13 baktuns is an important milestone for our creation (probably not the end, but certainly the end of the beginning), but true rollover happens at 20 baktuns, when the date (not counting previous creations) becomes 1.0.0.0.0.0.
In any case, no matter how long humanity will last, I think few will argue that the late 20th/early 21st centuries really did mark a transition. With the onset of bioengineering, nanotechnology, and computers (yes, it may seem they’re taking longer than we thought, but they’re really going to be a revolution) our world may finally cease to be like it has been for thousands of years and be changed in ways that plumbing and grocery stores and electric light never could quite changed it.
I bet Mayan insurance salesmen saved a bundle, not having to give any potential client more than one of those puppies, even after they wrote the policy…
It should be noted that we’ve known about the Maya Long Count calendar for longer than that. I remember learning about it some time in the 70s. It may be that they’ve figured out the other two Maya calendars at that time. I don’t know.
What did they use the Long Count for? They have a civil calendar and a religious calendar, so what did they do with the LC?
Thanks for the explanation of the significance of 13 baktuns. There is still something odd about the alautun, in’t it?. I mean, we don’t write our years in the form 00002008.
Yeah, as if our genus will even be around in 63 000 000 years. I suppose there might be some other haplorhini with a humanlike civilization, but I’m holding out for elephant supremacy.
Well, the stuff that I read didn’t go into the 63-million year cycle, and that’s not what most folks are wondering about. There are sub-cycles within sub-cycles, after all, and the one (possibly) revolving around in a few years is the one I wrote about. There’s plenty of info about the math behind the Mayan calendar online, so I didn’t bother to quote it all since it’s readily available.
I tried to say that by saying it’s a cycle, part of a repeating cycle, like the lunar cycle. You said it better than I did.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was trivial, but that there was doubtless some celebration surrounding it… just as Jews and Muslims celebrate the new moon, just as we celebrate the solar cycle or the millenium. But, like most primitive calendars, it was part of a world-view that all life is cyclic (sort of the opposite of our linear view of history.) Doesn’t mean they didn’t celebrate the various parts of that cycle, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I did mean to trivialize the notion that it marks the end of the whirled, of course.
To us, now, it looks like a transition. To the people alive in 2100, it’ll look no more like a transition than 1900 looks like to us now. Human societies, cultures, and technologies develop exponentially, so at any given time, it’s true to say that there has been more development in the past X amount of time than there has in all the æons before that (where the value of X depends on precisely what field you’re looking at).
Which, come to think of it, is itself a sort of cyclicalness. Exponential functions are mathematically very closely related to the trignometric functions typically used for periodic things.
There’s so much more than just that we alive today can witness the turning of an epoch. It’s coincidental in precedent with those of us who got ‘instant karma’ when first observing the earth from the moon in 1968. Then, as at the end of 2012, we will be privileged to count ouselves witness to the beginning of a new era. The Maya too have calculated that this cycle coincides with the position of the earth relative to the sun, and also to an opposite point of our galaxy. This is a position that the earth assumes (modern astronomers have confirmed the singularity of this relative position) every 2,600 years. Most interesting, and hopeful, is the interpretation that Maya wise ones and other seers, and intuitives share, that, as with all generative phases or acts, the energy of the maternal side will come to predominate our culture again. Thus the Age of Warriors is to give over to the Age of Nurturers for its time…to be followed by another Age of Young Men in about 1000 years when the women get shoved back into wherever the young men want to shove them. And so it goes!!