Inventor wrote:
The calender repetes in 52 years, till One Reed is the day and month in the start of the Sun Venus cycle. The Long Count, is 100 cycles, and nothing happened. Five Long Counts is an Age, and the end of The Fifth Sun.
Every 26,000 years the god comes, ends the age, not the earth, and a new Sun starts.
There is destruction, but then a thousand years of peace.
Every thousand generations god comes, we are that generation, we are so luckey!
I'm quoting from Wikipedia, but it matches what I've read elsewhere:
A different form of calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This form, known as the Long Count, is based upon the number of elapsed days since a mythological starting-point.[3] According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the GMT correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar
Since Calendar Round dates can only distinguish in 18,980 days, equivalent to around 52 solar years, the cycle repeats roughly once each lifetime, and thus, a more refined method of dating was needed if history was to be recorded accurately. To measure dates, therefore, over periods longer than 52 years, Mesoamericans devised the Long Count calendar.
The Maya name for a day was k'in. Twenty of these k'ins are known as a winal or uinal. Eighteen winals make one tun. Twenty tuns are known as a k'atun. Twenty k'atuns make a b'ak'tun.
The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from the Mayan creation date 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumk'u (August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar). But instead of using a base-10 (decimal) scheme like Western numbering, the Long Count days were tallied in a modified base-20 scheme. Thus 0.0.0.1.5 is equal to 25, and 0.0.0.2.0 is equal to 40. As the winal unit resets after only counting to 18, the Long Count consistently uses base-20 only if the tun is considered the primary unit of measurement, not the k'in; with the k'in and winal units being the number of days in the tun. The Long Count 0.0.1.0.0 represents 360 days, rather than the 400 in a purely base-20 (vigesimal) count.
Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun. But that is not the end of the Long Count because the 14th through 20th b'ak'tuns are still to come.
A baktun contains 144,000 days, equivalent to 394.25 tropical years.
So we've lived through - since say 0 AD - 6 or 7 baktuns - and nothing happened. I've read nothing that suggests a Long Count Cycle = 13 baktuns.
What is that based on? Why would they changed it on the last unit? Everything I've read says that it's base 20 for the the largest unit.
One Long Count is 7885 years and dating that back from the day of Mayan creation, the start of this age, the date this long count ends is about 4772 AD.
Where is the proof that 13 baktuns = 1 age?
It is a matter of dispute whether the first piktun occurs after 13 or after 20 b'ak'tun. In the same way, the fact that a 13-katun cycle was used, didn't negate the fact that there are 20 katuns in a b'ak'tun.
For example, on the west panel at the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, a section of the text projects into the future to the 80th Calendar Round (CR) 'anniversary' of the famous Palenque ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal's accession to the throne (Pakal's accession occurred on a Calendar Round date 5 Lamat 1 Mol, at Long Count 9.9.2.4.8 equivalent to 27 July 615 CE).[14] It does this by commencing with Pakal's birthdate 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ajaw 13 Pop (24 March 603 CE) and adding to it the Distance Number 10.11.10.5.8.[15] This calculation arrives at the 80th Calendar Round since his accession, a day that also has a CR date of 5 Lamat 1 Mol, but which lies over 4,000 years in the future from Pakal's time—the day 21 October in the year 4772. The inscription notes that this day would fall eight days after the completion of the 1st piktun [since the creation or zero date of the Long Count system], where the piktun is the next-highest order above the b'ak'tun in the Long Count. If the completion date of that piktun—13 October 4772—were to be written out in Long Count notation, it could be represented as 1.0.0.0.0.0. The 80th CR anniversary date, eight days later, would be 1.0.0.0.0.8 5 Lamat 1 Mo
A piktun which is greater than a baktun will be completed in 4772. Why therefore would they say an age end at 13/20th's of a larger unit? That's like celebrating the Y2K millenium in the 1700's.
The piktun is noted and it says in the inscription that it doesn't tick over till eight days before that anniversary. If 26000 years was such any important cycle why wouldn't they base it on that?
Is a long count 13 or 20 baktuns? Who knows for sure. But it doesn't make sense that for such a smart people, that their age would end disproportionately.
04 Jan 2010, 11:59 pm
