Niño

The Ancient Maya
Of course, there is no concrete evidence that the Maya--a diverse group of indigenous people who lived in parts of present-day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador andnorthwestern Honduras from about 2000 B.C.--could truly predict the future. They did, however, develop one of the most sophisticated and complex civilizations in the Western Hemisphere. They figured out how togrow corn, beans, squash and cassava in sometimes-inhospitable places; how to build elaborate cities without modern machinery; how to communicate with one another using one of the world's first writtenlanguages; and how to measure time using not one but two complicated calendar systems.

The Calendar Round
The first Mayan calendar, known as the Calendar Round system, was based on twooverlapping annual cycles: a 260-day sacred year and a 365-day secular year that named 18 months with 20 days each. (Five "unlucky" unnamed days were tacked on at year's end.) Under this system, each day wasassigned four pieces of identifying information: a day number and day name in the sacred calendar and a day number and month name in the secular calendar. Every 52 years counted as a single interval, orCalendar Round, and after each interval the calendar would reset itself like a clock.

The Long Count Calendar
But because the Calendar Round measured time in an endless loop, it was a bad way tofix events in an absolute chronology or in relationship to one another over a long period. For this job, a priest working in about 236 B.C. devised another system: a calendar that he called the LongCount. The Long Count system identified each day by counting forward from a fixed date in the distant past. (In the early 20th century, scholars found that this "base date" was August 11 or August 13,3114 BC.) It grouped days into sets, or cycles, as follows: baktun (144,000 days), k’atun (7,200 days), tun (360 days), uinal or winal (20 days) and kin (one day). (So, for example, a date that was...