1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [206]
Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the haab: eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike the tzolk’in, which counted off the days from 1, the haab months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to be unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers’ mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to within about ten seconds.
With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk’in name and a civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two different calendars, each perfectly regular (but one more regular than the other), marched in lockstep, forming what is now called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there would not be another 1 Ix 0 Xul for 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were able to give every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they couldn’t distinguish one fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and successors—as if the Christian calendar couldn’t distinguish 1810, 1910, and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time’s linear dimension, Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114 B.C. Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,” 360-day “years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “centuries” since the beginning. Archaeologists generally render these as a set of five numbers separated by dots. When Columbus landed, on Tuesday, October 11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as 11.13.12.4.3, with the “centuries” first and the days last. In the tzolk’in and haab, the day was 2 Akbal 6 Zotz.
Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers, the Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to add more positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated nineteen further positions, culminating in what is now called the alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is about 63 million years. Probably the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the alautun is a testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk’in is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long Count is among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for millions of years into the future.
NOTES
Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an exemplary case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect’s specifications for 1491. Except that this list is more selective, consisting as it does only of the works consulted necessary to make a particular point, not everything used