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Plate 1 Two interlocking toothed wheels, a small one divided into thirteen and a large one with twenty day-glyph boxes

Maya calendar

Several interlocking counts of days: the 260-day Tzolk’in, the 365-day Haab’, the 52-year Calendar Round and the Long Count. Maya daykeepers in Guatemala keep the 260-day count today, and the Long Count cycle that ended on 21 December 2012 foretold no end of the world.

Maya symbols and gods. Also called long count, mayan calendar, mayan calendar 2012, tzolkin.

Meaning

The Maya calendar is not one calendar but several that run together, as the NMAI’s Living Maya Time explains them. The Tzolk’in (Chol Q’ij in K’iche’) has no months: twenty named days combine with the numbers 1 to 13 to make 260 days, a span that matches nine moons, a human pregnancy and the growing of maize. The Haab’, whose name means “year” in Yucatec Maya, has eighteen months of twenty days and a short month of five, Wayeb: 18 × 20 + 5 = 365. A pair of dates from the two, such as 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u, comes round again only after 52 years, the Calendar Round, and Maya people hold that at 52 a person gains an elder’s wisdom. For longer spans the Long Count numbers the days since the creation of the present world on 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u, which the NMAI gives as 11 August 3114 BCE. On the Long Count, 1 January 2000 was 12.19.6.15.2. The 260-day count belongs to the living Maya: daykeepers keep it in the highlands of Guatemala, and printed Tzolk’in calendars are popular in Yucatán.

Origin and history

The 260-day count is older than the Maya. Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan calls it the oldest Mesoamerican calendar, shared by every people of the region, the Mexica (Aztecs) as the tonalpohualli and the Zapotecs as the piye, and finds the first calendar in stone among the Zapotecs of Oaxaca, around 600 to 500 BC; the Maya system appears around AD 250. Mark Van Stone, writing for FAMSI, describes the Aztec day count as derived from the Maya tzolk’in and working precisely the same way; Marcus’s dates put the 260-day count earlier than the Maya, and she warns that the Mesoamerican calendars share a structure but not their content, so none can be read as a model for the others.

The Long Count has an origin of its own. The epigrapher Guillermo Bernal Romero credits the late or “epi-Olmec” peoples of the Gulf Coast, who in the first century BC built the system of Long Count and Calendar Round on a base of twenty with place value, which needed a zero. The first Long Count dates are on Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo (36 BC) and Stela C at Tres Zapotes (32 BC); the Maya took the system up in the third century AD, and their earliest Long Count is on Stela 29 at Tikal (AD 292). The last Long Count carved on a Classic Maya monument, Monument 101 at Toniná, gives 10.4.0.0.0, 13 January 909. Turning these dates into ours depends on a correlation constant, 584,285 days, worked out by Goodman, Martínez and Thompson. Van Stone gives the end of the thirteenth bak’tun as 21 or 23 December 2012, depending on the correlation used.

Keeping the days today

The K’iche’ spiritual guide Vilma Poz describes an Ajq’ij on Living Maya Time as “the person who keeps the count of days, the one who works within the living Maya calendar”. Every 260 days, on 8 B’atz’, the Ajq’ijab’ (daykeepers) of highland Guatemala welcome a new cycle of the Chol Q’ij with the ceremony Wajxaqib’ B’atz’, at which new daykeepers are initiated; Roberto Poz Pérez, who lives near Quetzaltenango, has kept the days for more than thirty years. Guatemalan daykeepers, the museum records, say that time moves through the calendar “like a serpent”. In Yucatán, farmers follow the Haab’, holding the Sac Ha’, Cha’a Chac and Wajikol ceremonies in the same months each year, and in the Guatemalan highlands people hold special rites in the five days of Wayeb. Living Maya Time also ties the Day of the Dead in early November to the sun’s passage directly below the earth.

Did the Maya calendar predict the end of the world in 2012?

No. On 21 December 2012 the Long Count completed its thirteenth bak’tun, 13 periods of 144,000 days, and the NMAI states that there is no evidence in the inscriptions, or in any other record, that the ancient Maya expected a catastrophic end; the predictions “were unfounded and are not shared by the Maya people”, and most were made by non-experts who are not Maya. Only one Classic Maya inscription names the date: Monument 6 from Tortuguero in Tabasco, which Van Stone calls “the one and only Classic Maya document” to do so. In David Stuart’s translation it says that the thirteenth bak’tun will end and that a god or gods called Bolon Yokte’ will descend, to where the damaged text does not say. Inscriptions at Palenque count on past the thirteenth bak’tun, and Van Stone concludes that “the Palenque Maya did not expect 2012 to be the end of days”. José Huchim Herrera, a Yucatec Maya archaeologist, told the museum: “Maya time is cyclical, and the end of the Long Count calendar in December 2012 is just that, the end of a cycle.”

See also

Aztec day signs, Maya numerals (bar and dot), Sun Stone (the Aztec calendar stone), Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna.

Sources

  1. The Calendar System (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, The Calendar System
  2. The Maya Calendar System (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, resources (PDF), National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, pp. 1–2, 7
  3. Ser Ajq’ij, video transcript (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, transcript of “The Work of Calendar Keepers” (PDF), National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, transcript
  4. The Meaning of 2012 (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; section adapted from material by Bryan Mendez, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, The Meaning of 2012
  5. 2012: Resetting the Count (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2012: Resetting the Count
  6. 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, Part 2 (Mark Van Stone, FAMSI), Mark Van Stone, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, Part II (PDF), Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI), Tortuguero Monument 6; Palenque
  7. 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, Part 4: Appendix (Mark Van Stone, FAMSI), Mark Van Stone, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, Part IV, Appendix: Technicalities of the Calendars (PDF), Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI), Appendix: Technicalities of the Calendars
  8. Los calendarios prehispánicos (Joyce Marcus, Arqueología Mexicana), Joyce Marcus, “Los calendarios prehispánicos”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 41, pp. 12–19 (translated by Elisa Ramírez), Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  9. La cuenta larga y la máquina del tiempo (Guillermo Bernal Romero, Arqueología Mexicana), Guillermo Bernal Romero, “La cuenta larga y la máquina del tiempo”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 118, pp. 30–37, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
  10. The Sun Above, the Sun Below (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, The Sun Above, the Sun Below

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Last reviewed October 3, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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