The Maya Long Count Calendar: History, Meaning and the Cycles of Time

The Maya Long Count: A Calendar for Eternity

The Maya Long Count calendar is one of the most impressive intellectual achievements of the pre-Columbian world. While the well-known Tzolkin (260 days) and Haab (365 days) structured daily life, the Long Count was created to record long historical and cosmic time periods. It counts days since a mythical starting point – correlating with the Gregorian calendar to August 11, 3114 BCE.

The Long Count is not a prophecy calendar or a doomsday clock – it is an astronomical and historical instrument for placing time on a grand scale.

The Units of the Long Count

• Kin (1 day): The smallest unit
• Uinal (20 days): Equivalent to a "month" of the Haab
• Tun (360 days): An approximate solar year, 18 Uinals
• Katun (7,200 days ≈ 19.7 years): 20 Tuns
• Baktun (144,000 days ≈ 394 years): 20 Katuns

A complete Great Cycle consists of 13 Baktuns = 1,872,000 days = approximately 5,125 years. This is the cycle that ended on December 21, 2012 – not with the end of the world, but with the end of a great cosmic cycle and the beginning of a new one.

December 21, 2012

December 21, 2012 marked the end of the 13th Baktun in the Long Count and was sensationalized in Western media as "the Maya apocalypse." The Maya themselves saw it differently: as the end of a great time period and the beginning of a new one. Classical Maya inscriptions contain dates far beyond 2012 – indicating the Maya did not believe in a world ending at that point.

FAQ: The Maya Long Count Calendar

Is the Long Count calendar still in use?

No. The last known Long Count dates are from the early 10th century; after that the count disappears from the inscriptions. The 260-day calendar stayed alive: in the Guatemalan highlands, daykeepers still count the days today. The end of the 13th baktun on December 21, 2012 was celebrated in Tikal, among other places.

What actually happened on December 21, 2012?

December 21, 2012 marked the end of the 13th Baktun and the beginning of the 14th in the Long Count. It was a significant date in Maya cosmology – comparable to a millennium turn in our calendar. The apocalypse was a Western projection, not a Maya prophecy.

What is the difference between the Long Count and the Tzolkin?

The Tzolkin is a 260-day calendar for personal and ceremonial time. The Long Count is a historical-cosmic calendar covering grand time periods spanning millennia. Both run in parallel but serve very different purposes.