Baktun

The baktun is the largest of the commonly used units of the Maya Long Count, equal to twenty katuns, or 144,000 days, roughly 394 years. Long Count dates are conventionally written with the baktun first, as the leading of five numbers counting baktuns, katuns, tuns, winals, and kins since the mythic creation date, 4 Ajaw 8 Kumku, which corresponds in the standard correlation to a day in 3114 BCE. The completion of the thirteenth baktun from that point, in December 2012, drew wide popular attention and much misunderstanding; in the Maya reckoning it marked the turning of a great cycle, not an end of the world, and the count simply continued. Still larger units exist in some inscriptions. These are the features of the Maya Long Count, the linear day-tally carved on the monuments of the Classic period.

A Baktun is twenty Katun, 144,000 days, or roughly 394.3 solar years, the largest of the five standard places in the Long Count and the unit whose completion of its thirteenth cycle, 13.0.0.0.0, fell on 21 December 2012 in the widely used GMT (Goodman-Martinez-Thompson) correlation, which sets the Long Count's starting point 0.0.0.0.0 at Julian day number 584,283. That date attracted large-scale popular attention as a supposed end-of-the-world or global-transformation event, a reading epigraphers and Mayanists have consistently rejected: the Classic-period inscriptions that reference the 13th Baktun's completion, notably on Tortuguero Monument 6, describe it as an ordinary period-ending accompanied by the descent of a deity, in the same genre as other Katun and Baktun endings, and Long Count arithmetic continues without difficulty beyond it into a fourteenth Baktun and further, larger place values attested in a handful of inscriptions.

The baktun of 144,000 days, about 394 years, is the largest of the five places normally written, and thirteen baktuns from the Long Count origin fell on 13.0.0.0.0, which under the GMT correlation is 21 December 2012. A great deal was made of that date in popular writing, and almost none of it came from the Maya sources.

What the inscriptions show is that thirteen baktuns completed a previous era, since the origin itself is recorded as 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 8 Kumku, and that the count did not stop there. Higher units above the baktun exist and are used: Classic inscriptions at Palenque and elsewhere give dates thousands of years in the future written with those higher places, which would be meaningless if the count were expected to end. One Palenque text reaches into the fifth millennium of the common era.

A very small number of Classic texts mention the 2012 period ending at all, and they treat it as a period ending. Maya organisations in Guatemala objected during the run-up to it that an apocalyptic reading had been attached to their calendar from outside, and the daykeepers who still run the 260-day count carried on running it through the date and afterwards.

The wider lesson is one this atlas has to apply repeatedly. A living or historical tradition acquires a modern overlay, the overlay circulates far more widely than the tradition, and the tradition is then read back through it. The 2012 literature is a large and recent example, and Jose Arguelles's Dreamspell, which borrows the Tzolk'in's structure under invented names, is another. In both cases the honest description separates what the sources say from what was later attached to them.