“365 Days of Haab: The Mayan solar calendar was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (vigesimal notation). This produced 360 days, or one tun. In common with many religious calendars of the world, the shortfall of five extra days added on to make the 365 days of the solar year was a spirit-haunted period of ill omen, the five nameless Wayab days.
The habit of multiplying by 20 continued beyond the year, so that twenty tun (almost a solar year) is a katun, which was a great unit of time commemorated with inscribed standing stones and pyramid temples. Twenty katuns produced a baktun and twenty baktuns produce a piktun of 7,885 solar years. We have not quite got to a piktun, though quite recently, at the winter solstice of 2012, we celebrated the completion of thirteen baktuns which some observers too to be a possible date for the end of the world. The thirteen-baktun date (21-12-2012), which was safely achieved, begins by starting the calendar back at Year One in 3113 BC.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Mark's Text Terminal 