The Maya Calendar

The Maya devised an intricate calendar system whose dates you'll see on monuments at Copán, although today's Maya-descended peoples in Honduras have fully adopted the Western Gregorian calendar.

The system is technically a three-in-one interlocking calendar. The Maya did not entirely develop the scheme, but refined during the late pre-Classic period earlier conventions of dating developed by the Olmec civilization of Mexico. Some scholars surmise that the calendar marks the Maya calculation of the beginning of the world at what would correspond to our August 11, 3114 BC.

At the system's base is the Tzolkin calendar made up of 13 cycles of 20 days. Each of the resulting 260 days bears a unique name, combining day and cycle. Why 13 and 20? Theories abound. The human body contains 13 major joints (three for each limb plus the neck.) The domain of the gods also contained 13 levels. The Maya used a base-20 numbering system (as opposed to ours, which is based on 10). Twenty may have been chosen because it's the total number of fingers and toes, suggest some historians. Other experts suggest that 260 days roughly corresponds to the nine months of human pregnancy, and that midwives may have developed the Tzolkin system to aid in prediction of birth dates.

Running in parallel to the Tzolkin system is the Haab calendar, approximately matching the solar year, with 18 months of 20 days each, plus five unnamed days, considered dangerous for many activities. Though Mayan astronomers were able to calculate quite an accurate length of the solar year, those calculations did not form part of the Haab calendar, which remained fixed at 365 days, and had no leap-year fixes to even things out.

Combine Tzolkin and Haab to get a cycle of 18,980 days that lasts 52 solar years, perhaps an average life expectancy back in the Maya heyday. But to describe the entire Maya history, which obviously took place outside the 52-year cycle, it became necessary to create what scholars today refer to as the Long Count calendar. Here's the kicker: the Long Count cycle concludes on December 21, 2012. Whether that will represent the apocalypse or simply a turning over of the odometer, you'll have to decide. (Google "maya calendar 2012" to see what all the fuss is about.) No predictions have been made, but we do know that lodgings here in Copán Ruinas have already been taking bookings for that date.