Maya Long Count: The Calendar Behind the 2012 Myth

The Maya day-count that starts in 3114 BCE, turned over a great cycle on December 21, 2012, and reaches numbers far larger than that.

The Long Count is a Mesoamerican day count from a zero date in 3114 BCE. It reached 13 bak'tuns on December 21, 2012, a calendar turnover, not a Maya prophecy of the end of the world.

The Long Count is a calendar used in Mesoamerica, most famously by the Classic Maya, to count days from a fixed starting point. It works in units of twenty with one exception: 20 days make a winal, 18 winals a tun of 360 days, 20 tuns a k'atun, and 20 k'atuns a bak'tun of 144,000 days, about 394 years. Dates were carved on stone monuments in this form, such as 9.12.11.5.18.

The count's zero point, written 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u, corresponds by the most widely accepted correlation to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. Maya inscriptions treat this as the date of the current creation. The earliest surviving Long Count dates come from the late first century BCE, in Chiapas and the Gulf Coast, well before the Classic Maya peak.

The next time the count reached 13 bak'tuns was December 21, 2012 (or 23, depending on the correlation). Only one known ancient Maya inscription, Monument 6 from Tortuguero, mentions that date, in a damaged passage about the god Bolon Yokte'. The modern prophecies of apocalypse or transformation were not Maya predictions.

What makes the Long Count remarkable is its scale. Some inscriptions, such as a stela at Coba, write the creation date with many higher units above the bak'tun, implying a time span far longer than the age of the universe as we measure it. The system shows a civilization thinking about deep time with precision.