By the second century a. d., Maya royalty had mastered cultivation of the land, expanded the state, built great cities, monumentalized architecture and ultimately established one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. About this time, the rulers also made a fundamental revision in their calendar, one that we might well anticipate, having seen it happen before. They created a skyscraper-sized time cycle, a brilliant invention built upon an amalgam with a profusion of subcyclic levels that held the potential to catapult them all the way back to the gods' creation itself. Eight hundred years after the first appearance of the tzolkin the Maya began to reckon time in the Long Count.
Similar to our Julian-day scheme, the Long Count has been likened to the way the odometer on an automobile functions, by clicking off one day at a time in endless succession. (A misleading model, for there actually is no evidence the Maya ever used gears or machinery to keep time!) There is one essential difference, however, between your automobile and the Maya universe; when the odometer turns over, thus signaling the resting point on the longest Maya time cycle of all (some five thousand years by our way of reckoning), then the universe will be destroyed and reborn anew.
When does a culture begin the process of seeking the origin of time and when does it resort to telling the story in word and picture? We might think that the making of an origin myth on this scale is possible only in highly stratified, literate, bureaucratic societies—those we often refer to, perhaps somewhat mistakenly, as advanced. We do know that the Maya became passionate about giving the most precise material expression to their long-term history during the Classical period when they erected most of their buildings, did most of their writing, created most of their art and sculpture, and expanded their influence over a sizable region of Mesoamerica. They did it by expressing the past in Long Count inscriptions in a base-20 system: in other words, each place in a number series contained 20 times the quantity of the previous one, except for the third place upward in the hierarchy; this they called a tun, and it held 18 times 20 instead of the logical 20 times 20 days, probably because 360 was a closer approximation than 400 to a year. Twenty tuns made up a katun-, and 20 katuns, a baktun, conventionally the highest number in the chain.
Take, for example, the Long Count number 9.15.5.8.0, which translates as follows:
(kin) 0X1
(uinfli) 0 X 20
(tun) 5 X 20 X 18
{katun) 15x20x18x20
(bflktun) 9 X 20 X 18 X 20 X 20
Total 1,405,800 kin since the last creation
The root word tun means "stone" and signifies the carved stone stelae, the time pillars that the Maya faithfully erected every time the odometer turned—but especially on katun endings. In our culture it would be like erecting a monument every time a decade or a century elapsed (a katun is about 20 years). Like the days of the 260-day cycle, each katun carried its prophesies while at the same time it also harbored the record of what had already transpired. This curious admixture of time-past and time-future concocted within a cyclic framework suggests that the ancient Maya did not segregate past from future as we do. For them, the past could and, indeed, did repeat itself. If you paid close enough attention to time, you could see that the past already contained the future. Read the curious blend of past and future tenses in one segment of a katun wheel taken from the Maya colonial Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin. The year was 1607; the fourteenth year of a civil war, the katun had begun with day name 1 Ix in the tzolkin. Strife and suffering had taken hold of the people. The priests made predictions by divining shark entrails and by giving attention to meteorological and astronomical events:
On the fourteenth measure On the first of Pop,
On the fourteenth tun is the time In the katun period.
There remains being made to fight oneself.
The fighters arrive with the East priest Uayab Xoc At the time of seeking fire.
Of seeking shark tails.
That is the return of seeking things.
When one seeks then
In the sky,
In storms,
Sun phases.
Far seeing.
At the time of covering of the face of the sun.
Of covering of the face of the moon, (Which recurred)
On the fourteenth tun again.
Destroyed is the year By pleasure:
Suffering mouth for the mother.
Suffering mouth for the father,-Suffer girls.
Suffer boys.
Destroyed is the residue of the governor.
Already past is his change;
Already past is his change of office. Destroying the town He had seized.
The East priest Uayab Xoc
On the day of the pyramid of pain,
Of the stone pyramid.
No one goes When it is given On the seen day.
On the return of the katun period. Already past is the moon of the remainder Of the judgment of the Itza To return to the north.
To return to the west.
They join together the descendants of the tun.
The stalks of the hills.
Which recurred
In this fourteenth tun again.
The day of suffering.
The katun of suffering.
Descended are the stingers Descended are red were bees,
Attracted to the wells,
To the springs.
Occurring
According to what is in the arrangement
Of the writing And glyphs.
It was to return in this fourteenth tun Or was to occur at the need of the chiefs.
The renewal of the governors
In this fourteenth tun again. (2409-67)®
The Maya traced creation all the way back to 11 August 3113 b. c. Like Bishop Ussher, who sought to follow the Old Testament lineage back to Adam and Eve by counting generations in Genesis, some astute Maya priest must have sat in his temple scribbling calculations concerning how his rulers' lineage might be tied into some already canonized information about the gods. Since most carved stelae date from baktun 9, with a few 8s and 7s sprinkled in, we are led to believe all this calculating went on early in the Classical era, in the same way our B c - A D system of counting was instituted well after the death of Christ.
The Long Count with its 13s and 20s seems to have grown out of the Calendar Round. As I hinted, the Maya may have conceived it as a year or tun cycle of 360 days obtained by lopping off the unlucky days at the end of the vague year. Later, some clever Maya mathematician extended the cycle by multiplying each successive order by 20. In a sense, that genius flattened out a portion of time's circle, thus giving it a more linear appearance. It is only when we contemplate the Long Count over a considerable duration, like thousands of years instead of days, that time becomes cyclic again. The effect is rather like looking out over a distant horizon: experience tells you the land before you is really flat, but if you go far enough, your trajectory will curve back on itself.
The lengthening of durational sequences in Maya timekeeping early on in the Classical period clearly was done with a motive, by a person or class of persons desirous of propagating the notion that the present can be stabilized by projecting it mucb further back into the past than anyone had ever contemplated.
World History
