Saturday Rave: The Mesoamerican Long--Count Calendar.

Let's face it, our Western calendar system is rubbish.

Not only does it work in two directions, forwards and backwards, centring on a date that almost certainly isn't the date of the birth of Jesus Christ, but everything is counted in bonkers ways.

We have millennia, centuries, and years, which is, fair enough, a practical sort of a system, but then some idiot has divided the year into unevenly-sized months (only one of which is the same length as an actual month, that is a lunar cycle - and that's only once every four years).

Then the month is divided into various odd numbers of days, the day into twenty four hours, the hours into sixty minutes, and the minutes into sixty seconds. 

Below that we go into milliseconds and things start to make sense again.

But the plain fact is that this is such a crazy and difficult system that we have to have a parallel system called a week which ignores all of this, just to give ourselves regular breaks.

The Mesoamerican Long-Count calendar begins, quite logically, on the day the world of human beings began to be formed. That, according to the Maya, was August 11 3114 BC. On this day some gods set up three stones at a place named First-Three-Stone-Place, and once everyone had a reference point then the sky could be raised and things generally put in order.

The Long-Count calendar therefore uses a one-direction numbering system. It's based on the number twenty, except that whereas in a pure twenty-base system the figures 100 equals twenty x twenty, or what we call four hundred, the Long-Count system has a quirk whereby the second digit from the right (and just the second digit from the right) rolls over to zero when it gets to eighteen...

And if you think that's daft, then consider: the second-digit-from-the-right rule makes the figure 100 equal 360, which is almost the number of days in a year.

And that's really rather neat and clever.


Word To Use Today: calendar. This word comes from the Latin kalendārium, which means account book. The kalends were the dates upon which debts became due.