The only small, popular book on the important subject of ancient calendars. The study of heavenly cycles is common to most ancient cultures. The ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Babylonians all tried to make sense of the year. But it fell to the later Mesoamerican Maya to create a series of calendars that could be cross referenced. In doing so, the Maya discovered many strange numerical harmonics. Their lunar calendar was extremely accurate-far more so than the Greek Metonic cycle; they tracked Venus to an accuracy of less than a day in five hundred years and their tables could have been used to predict eclipses seven hundred years in the future. This book will provide a much needed compact guide to the Mayan calendar systems as well as covering the essentials of calendar development throughout the world.

In Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos, Prudence M. Rice proposed a new model of Maya political organization in which geopolitical seats of power rotated according to a 256-year calendar cycle known as the May. This fundamental connection between timekeeping and Maya political organization sparked Rice's interest in the origins of the two major calendars used by the ancient lowland Maya, one 260 days long, and the other having 365 days. In Maya Calendar Origins, she presents a provocative new thesis about the origins and development of the calendrical system. Integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, art history, astronomy, ethnohistory, myth, and linguistics, Rice argues that the Maya calendars developed about a millennium earlier than commonly thought, around 1200 BC, as an outgrowth of observations of the natural phenomena that scheduled the movements of late Archaic hunter-gatherer-collectors throughout what became Mesoamerica. She asserts that an understanding of the cycles of weather and celestial movements became the basis of power for early rulers, who could thereby claim "control" over supernatural cosmic forces. Rice shows how time became materialized—transformed into status objects such as monuments that encoded calendrical or temporal concerns—as well as politicized, becoming the foundation for societal order, political legitimization, and wealth. Rice's research also sheds new light on the origins of the Popol Vuh, which, Rice believes, encodes the history of the development of the Mesoamerican calendars. She also explores the connections between the Maya and early Olmec and Izapan cultures in the Isthmian region, who shared with the Maya the cosmovision and ideology incorporated into the calendrical systems.

By 1,800 years ago, speakers of proto-Ch’olan, the ancestor of three present-day Maya languages, had developed a calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a set of five days for a total of 365 days. This original Maya calendar, used extensively during the Classic period (200–900 CE), recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions the dates of dynastic and cosmological importance. Over time, and especially after the Mayas’ contact with Europeans, the month names that had originated with these inscriptions developed into fourteen distinct traditions, each connected to a different ethnic group. Today, the glyphs encompass 250 standard forms, variants, and alternates, with about 570 meanings among all the cognates, synonyms, and homonyms. In The Maya Calendar, Weldon Lamb collects, defines, and correlates the month names in every recorded Maya calendrical tradition from the first hieroglyphic inscriptions to the present—an undertaking critical to unlocking and understanding the iconography and cosmology of the ancient Maya world. Mining data from astronomy, ethnography, linguistics, and epigraphy, and working from early and modern dictionaries of the Maya languages, Lamb pieces together accurate definitions of the month names in order to compare them across time and tradition. His exhaustive process reveals unsuspected parallels. Three-fourths of the month names, he shows, still derive from those of the original hieroglyphic inscriptions. Lamb also traces the relationship between month names as cognates, synonyms, or homonyms, and then reconstructs each name’s history of development, connecting the Maya month names in several calendars to ancient texts and archaeological finds. In this landmark study, Lamb’s investigations afford new insight into the agricultural, astronomical, ritual, and even political motivations behind names and dates in the Maya calendar. A history of descent and diffusion, of unexpected connectedness and longevity, The Maya Calendar offers readers a deep understanding of a foundational aspect of Maya culture.

Take a look at the science behind the Mayan calendar, prophecies and mythology. The Maya believed multiple cycles governed civilization. They created various calendars to track these cycles. Their short count calendar tracked a 256-year cycle believed to control epidemics, famines, warfare and more. Scientists have found a 250-year solar cycle that also appears to affect epidemics, famines, warfare and more. Their long count calendar tracked a 5000-year cycle related to natural disasters and cosmic catastrophes. Scientists have also discovered that the Earth is subjected to periodic bombardment by comets and asteroids that plunges the world into long periods of darkness and cold. Mayan mythology appears to record such events and in some instances even the exact dates on which these catastrophes occurred in the past. By comparing these dates with ice core records, sedimentary records, and climate records, this book reveals the truth about civilization's darkest days. And what may lie ahead in the future.

When his archaeologist parents go missing in Central America, fourteen-year-old Max embarks on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld in search of the legendary Jaguar Stones, which enabled ancient Mayan kings to wield the powers of living gods. Includes cast of characters, glossary, facts about the Maya cosmos and calendar, and a recipe for chicken tamales.

Dates form the backbone of written history. But where do these dates come from? Many different calendars were used in the ancient world. Some of these calendars were based upon observations or calculations of regular astronomical phenomena, such as the first sighting of the new moon crescent that defined the beginning of the month in many calendars, while others incorporated schematic simplifications of these phenomena, such as the 360-day year used in early Mesopotamian administrative practices in order to simplify accounting procedures. Historians frequently use handbooks and tables for converting dates in ancient calendars into the familiar BC/AD calendar that we use today. But very few historians understand how these tables have come about, or what assumptions have been made in their construction. The seven papers in this volume provide an answer to the question what do we know about the operation of calendars in the ancient world, and just as importantly how do we know it? Topics covered include the ancient and modern history of the Egyptian 365-day calendar, astronomical and administrative calendars in ancient Mesopotamia, and the development of astronomical calendars in ancient Greece. This book will be of interest to ancient historians, historians of science, astronomers who use early astronomical records, and anyone with an interest in calendars and their development.

Mayan daykeeper Hunbatz Men reveals the multi-calendar system of the Maya that guided the lives of his ancestors and how it can guide us today • The first book to reveal the secrets of the Mayan Pleiades calendar: the Tzek’eb • Explains how the Maya used their astronomical knowledge to guide their lives on Earth The Mayan Calendar has taken on special prominence with the imminent arrival of 2012, a date that many claim is the end of that calendar. However, as Mayan elder and daykeeper Hunbatz Men shows, the cosmological understanding of his ancestors was so sophisticated that they had not one, but many calendars, each based on the cycles of different systems in the cosmos. In this book he reveals for the first time the Tzek’eb, or Pleiades, Calendar of 26,000 years, which charts the revolution of our solar system around Alcyone, the central star of the Pleiades system. He also discusses the K’uuk’ulcan Calendar of the 4 seasons of the solar year and the wheel of the K’altunes Calendar, which is composed of 13 cycles of 20 years each that form a calendar of 260 years. In traditional Mayan culture the computation of time was not determined by simple economic or social motives. The calendars served the higher purpose of synchronizing the lives of human beings and their societies to the great cosmic pulsation, to the rhythm of the annual seasons, and to the other cycles that dictate changes upon Earth. Mayan understanding of the cosmic cycles was so exact that this knowledge could be used to influence all stages of life--from planning when to conceive (parents could choose not only the sex of their child but its vocation and future destiny) to plotting out the course of the entire society. Pyramids played a crucial role in applying this wisdom because, as Hunbatz Men shows, they were able to produce and transform energy in accordance with the cosmic cycles charted by the calendars. This book reveals for the first time the wisdom of the multi-calendar Mayan system and how it can help guide our modern world.