The Maya's First Known Calendar: The Round Calendar

The society had two main calendars. One calendar was called tzolkin, the sacred or ritual calendar. It predicted the "...ceremonial life of the people."(Doc D) The other was called haab, the civil/solar calendar. The civil/ solar predicted the weather, and unlucky days for the year. Both of these calendar cycles were used together. "They were like two cogged wheels, revolving alongside each other, with the cogs (days) meshing as the wheels turned." (Doc D) The Mayan calendars were far more accurate and more advanced than any other New World people. Document D also informs us that "Observatories were built, at Chicen Itza and other cities, to use in studying the movements of the sun and the moon, planets such as Venus and Mars, and the

The Mayan number system is their most remarkable achievement. In document C it says”They were one of the first cultures in the world to develop the idea of zero.” Document C also says”The Maya used a positional system based on 20 rather than 10.” The first piece of evidence shows that The Mayan number system is their most remarkable achievement. The second

They used a positional system based on the number 20 rather than 10. As Document C shows us, they even had symbols for the numbers 1, 5, and 0 which helped differentiate. They made use of this system by incorporating it into the calendars i talked about earlier. The Mayans were one of the first cultures in the world to develop the idea of the zero. This evidence proves that this achievement was remarkable because it was genius.

The number system also helped how the calendars would be. The Mayans last achievement, was the Calendars. The three calendars were the Tzolkin, Long Count, and Haab (Doc D). The Tzolkin was used to keep track of religious days. The Long Count was used to track days.

Around the god of the sun were other god figures. The aztec calendar contained eighteen months and twenty days. They also had a god of the moon. They believed in gods that make things happen. They say if they don't believe in the gods that they will have

The Maya had 800 distinct hieroglyphs, with the first evidence of language written on stela and walls of buildings beginning ca 300 BC. Bark cloth paper codexes were being used no later than the 1500s, but all but a handful were destroyed by Spanish.

After looking over the symbols they created and how they were simple and understanding, I realized that the Mayans were way ahead of their time. All they used were dots and lines and as a zero, it was just a rugby ball looking thing. Instead of creating 400 different symbols to create just the number 400, they used four symbols and just changed the combination of them differently. Forty used three symbols, one rugby ball symbol and two single dots. Four hundred used three symbols too, two rugby ball looking symbols and just one single dot. By far more the one of the better in complex number systems. Compared to the Aztecs, who had feathers for 400 and finger symbols for 1, the Mayan’s number system was easy, with just dots and lines.

The Maya have a firm belief in a logical order that pervaded all aspects of the universe, which is why they developed a complex number and calendar system and were deeply interested in studying astronomy and making divinations, a mathematical science that is complex by today's standards as well.

The Maya were a people from Middle America, which includes modern Guatemala, Southern Mexico, and Northern Belize (Editors). The Maya civilization was considered to be “one of the most dominant indigenous societies of Mesoamerica,” (Maya). “The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar-making, and mathematics, and left behind an astonishing amount of impressive architecture and symbolic artwork,” (Maya). They also gave mankind the modern calendar (Jarus, Maya). The Mayans were a very advanced people, but one of the most important things in the Mayan culture was their religion/god worshipping rituals.

Mayans created the only true writing system native to americans, it was highly sophisticated, and only member of the higher class could really read it. The Mayans had developed a complicated system of writing that involved phonetic or syllabic symbols and pictographs. The writing was incorporated among architecture written on buildings, stones,wood, etc. Mayans had four Codices; the Dresden, Paris, Madrid, and The Grolier. These were inscribed in fig tree bark which were folded and bound with deer hide and wood.

Maya calendars, mythology and astrology were integrated into a single system of belief. The Maya observed the sky and calendars to predict solar and lunar eclipses, the cycles of the planet Venus, and the movements of the constellations(a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern

The Mayans were also were technologically advanced. They used their own math system. One dot stood for one, a bar symbolized five, and a shell figure was zero. The numbers were expressed vertically with the highest on top. The also created a very precise calendars. Two different calendars were calculated 260-day and a 365-day. They were able to calculate the dates because at noon time there was no shadow. This was important for them to use in predicting eclipses, scheduling religious ceremonies, and when to plant and harvest.

What Mayan writing seems to represent is a sacred language used only by the elite, initiated, and known only by them. The language of the Mayan was identical with that of the Yucatan Indians, given the fact that writing was identical. The Maya kept records on large stone monuments called stelae. They used the Steele to record important dates and to take note of great events in the lives of their rulers.(Price 91)They also used the stelae to recount the positions of the “heavenly bodies”_ particularly the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter.(Miller)

This source provides a thorough timeline of the major events that took place in deciphering the Mayan scripts, beginning in the 16th century when Spanish invaders conquered the Maya empire and forced them to convert to Christianity and speak and write in Spanish. In addition to that, the Spanish invaders wanted to wipe out the ancient Maya script. For example, a friar named Diego Landa staged a massive burning of hundreds of Maya bark-paper books because he believed them to be unorthodox. Yet, four years later Landa wrote a manuscript about the Maya called “Relation of the Things of Yucatan”. Coupled with the Dresden Codex (one of the four Maya illustrated books surviving today), that many scholars believe one of the conquistadors, Hernando

When most people think of the Mayans, they think end of the world prediction in 2012. Everyone knows the movie 2012 which portrayed the end of the world predicted by the Mayan calendar. What many do not know is that the Mayans developed three separate calendars; the Long Count, the Tzolk’in, and the Haab, which were represented by glyphs or pictures that were used in their daily lives in many different ways. The Mayans kept time in a very different way than we do today. The Mayans may not have invented the calendar, but they certainly developed it further, and still use their version today.