Ahhhhhhhhh! I just noticed that I got the OP’s name wrong. It’s ralph124c, not ralph124c41. I was thinking of the character from the novel, who’s called Ralph 124C 41+.
You may not concern *yourself *with anything beyond the AD1900-2100 bracket, but the culture you live in likes to publish materials discussing events they claim to date to 4004BC (creationism), or that went on in 480BC (the movie 300) or that they imagine could be set around the year 10,000 After the Machine Crusade (Dune). Greatly influential people and institutions in this culture further like to discuss and publish about such as the AD1054 supernova and about events 65 million years ago (Xichulub asteroid impact). And all those real and fictional dates in deep time forward and back get recorded for posterity in different media, and some of that will survive to be studied centuries hence.
Sometimes people just want to speculate as to where do the calculations lead if you keep going beyond the immediate practical application. It’s one of the side effects of high civilization, once you move up from everyone struggling to subsist, there’s people who will have the time and inclination to apply their time to deep time calendrics, or speculative theology, or shoe fashions, or iPhone apps, or message boards.
So as a classical-period Maya citizen, RabbitTail124c may have only concerned himself with events since the most recent Katun 11 Ahau, but king JaguarEye1, the guy who had those stelae carved “published” what came from the High Priests who had looked up these kinds of more impressive, more intellectual things.
OK how much did the average Mayan care, or even know about this? You had a priest assigned to work on a calendar. Once he worked out the system, it was easy to go on and on. Eventually management discovered he had gotten to 2012 and decided he might be better employed at another task.
The Mayas were very aware of dates and concerned with the astrological significance of the calendar, but so was everyone else. Dates really, really matter in an agricultural society, and figuring out the annual cycle is of huge importance. It’s no surprise that what starts with needing to know when is a good time to plant or harvest turns into finding lucky days to start wars or have a child. The Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese all were very concerned with determining auspicious days for things. Many people still are.
I think we tend to focus disproportionately on Mayan dates because for a good hundred years, and up until about 20 years ago, that was about all we could read. The dates jumped out from a sea of gibberish, so all the best minds focused on figuring out exactly what they meant. Also, it’s a long-standing tradition for layperson-type books on Mesoamerica to spend a lot of time proving that they were “real” civilizations, and “complex dating system” is a big part of that–as if any group of savages could throw up monumental architecture and have elaborate socio-political structures, but only the civilized can talk about when things happened. So the pop culture impression of the Maya is that they were pretty obsessed with dates: all the books go on and on about it.
Yes, you bring up a good point that I had been thinking about. One reason for extending a calendar a long ways into the future was to test its accuracy. The 365 1/4 day year gave the calendar makers a challenge. As recently as the 1700’s we had to make a huge correction in our calendar.
This is quite an exaggeration. The switch from Julian to Gregorian was actually a transition from a lunar-based calendar to a solar based one.
The British empire (which included the US at the time) switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar around 1750 and it involved losing something like 11 days (at the time) to the calendar. For groups that still use the Julian calendar, the correction is up to 13 or 14 days and that number will increase by another day in 2100 AD.
The Julian calendar wasn’t quite as concerned with keeping to the solar year and used to include what could be termed ‘leap months’ to keep the seasons roughly aligned with the calendar. Basically, the switch meant we completed the transition to a solar calendar, rather than one that still had ties to a lunar calendar.
For what it’s worth, the Julian calendar is still used by several Eastern Orthodox churches, even though the last major national holdout (Russia and several surround countries) finally switched over to Gregorian around the time of the October Revolution. I think there may even be a few small countries that use it, but I’m not entirely sure about it.
I don’t know what calendar you’re thinking of, Great Antibob (the Jewish calendar, maybe?), but the Julian calendar had no connection at all to the Moon. The difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is that the Julian calendar had a leap day every four years, while the Gregorian skips three of them every 400 years.
Ironically, the Jewish calendar (which is sol-lunar and does have leap months) has not needed any such correction, since it happens to come out accurate enough already.
Considering that the occasional leap second make sht enews, I find an 11 day correction huge.
If your food supply varies throughout the year (as it would in just about every pre-industrial society), there may well be good and bad times of year to have a child. Or if the amount of work you have to do to keep yourself fed varies during the year, there might be better and worse times to have a child. Some academic parents-to-be still take this one into consideration.
Starting your wars in season was and is important, too. Ask Napoleon, or Hitler.
Having recently re-read Mann’s 1491, I want to say that **Captain Amazing **nailed it. The Long Count was a means of nailing down a specific, unique date (e.g., in our calendar, compare April 5 vs. Tuesday, April 5 vs. Tuesday, April 5, 2011). If I think of it, I’ll see if I can dig up a cite when I get home.
My personal pet theory is that the Mayan king had a royal calendar maker, who’s job it was to chisel the official calendar out of rock every year. It was hard work, but a steady job with good pay, and his supervisor was kind of lax, so everyday he went to work and chiseled out calendars. Nobody ever told him to stop so he just kept going until eventually his supervisor finally told him, “Hey, we got calendars through to f-ing 2012 AD, so knock it off already!” and fired him.
Yes, but when you start thinking that starting a war on this Tuesday will be lucky, but this Wednesday will be sure to end in disaster, I think you are beyond what is actually useful.
For the vast majority of things–including childbirth, wars, migrations–knowing the general time of year is probably good enough. It’s only with the advent of agriculture that you really need to know the DAY, because predicting the first and last hard frost to within a week or so can be really important, and knowing the day is the best (though still imperfect) way to do that. Once you have a motive to know the actual, particular day, it’s pretty easy to see why you would start adding significance to all the other days, as well.
Have the dates of the earlier “rollovers” been studied? Anything unusual happen?
Without checking the dates, I can say with some certainty that the Apocalypse did not happen on any of them.
The “official” start date of the current Long Count is September 6, 3114 BC.
Did anything unusual happen that day ? Well, one guy in South America got the weird idea to start counting days from there to 2012 AD. That’s unusual, innit ? 
Cute, guys, but at least one rollover happened late enough for there to be geological evidence of catastrophic events; I’m just wondering if anyone ever looked for them.
Wasn’t it based on astronomical observations, particularly of Venus?
Aliens told them about it.
Seeing that we search for conditions in the universe at Planck times, we’ve got everyone beat. Somewhere Mayans are laughing at us.
Doesn’t the longest cycle of the Hindu calendar extend even further than that, though?