The unit in millions of years provides evidence that the Maya did not believe the world was ending at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun.

“The Maya had several rarely used units that were even larger than b'ak'tuns, giving them the capacity to count millions of years into the future,” said Walter Witschey, a retired archaeologist and Maya expert at Longwood University. However, the long-count calendar did not predict the end of the world in 2012. The 13th b’ak’tun ended on December 21 2012, giving rise to the popular belief that the world would end on that day. The b’ak’tun is a cycle of the calendar that is 144,000 days or nearly 400 years long, and the Maya believed 13 b’ak’tuns represented a full cycle of creation. This system also included what scholars call a 'long-count' calendar that kept track of time by using different units, ranging in length from a single day to millions of years. '1,700 years ago, speakers of proto-Ch'olan, the ancestor for three Maya languages still in use, had developed a calendar of 18 20-day months plus a set of five days,' wrote Weldon Lamb, a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University, in his book ' The Maya Calendar: A Book of Months (opens in new tab)' (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). The Maya calendar system was complicated. (Image credit: Erich Andres/United Images via Getty Images) (opens in new tab)Ī system of writing that used symbols called glyphs to represent words or sounds was developed and frequently inscribed on buildings, steles, artifacts and books called codices.

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