A Mayan primer

[gfish]

Mayan monument inscriptions are usually read in pairs of columns, though this is flexible to match layout requirements. They usually start with a very precise date, called the Initial Series, and then say what happened on that date, and on dates relative to it.

Mayans really liked calendars. They liked them so much, they had several. The most important one is the Long Count, which counts days from September 6, 3114 BC. These are broken up into bak'tuns, k'atuns, tuns, winals and k'ins. December 7, 2006 is 12.19.13.15.12. This count will roll over on December 21, 2012, marking the start of a new phase of the world.

There is the Tzolk'in, which is a 260 day liturgical calendar. Dates are specified by a number (1-13) and one of 20 names. The number and day both incremented every day.

There is also the Haab', a more practical 365 calendar which had a month concept like ours. It had 18 months of 20 days, plus a 5 day filler month at the end called Wayeb'. (A very unlucky time of the year.)

Together the Tzolk'in and the Haab' form the Calendar Round, which repeats every 52 years.

The Initial Series consists of the Long Count, the Calendar Round, and a variety of optional lunar information.

The grammar used on monumental inscriptions is stylized and terse. The language is VSO (verb subject object), but most inscriptions don't have an object. They liked their intransitive verbs.

This inscription can be broken into 4 sections:

The Initial Series:
	The Initial Series Introductory Glyph (ISIG). They often span 2 columns and are pretty distinctive. The central section changes depending on the month of the date.
	12 bak'tuns. A bak'tun is 144000 days, or 20 k'atuns.
	19 k'atuns. A k'atun is 7200 days, or 20 tuns.
	13 tuns. A tun is 360 days, or 18 winals.
	15 winals. A winal is 20 days.
	12 k'ins. A k'in is a day.
	6 'Eb. Tzolk'in date.
	G6. This glyph is one a series of 9 gods, related to the Aztec Lords of the Night. There is a bunch of other information that is often inserted into the Initial Series here, mostly relating to the moon.
	5 Mak. Haab' date.
Primary clause
	He/she/they/it planted/erected
	A stela
	Ta-ku-li-yi -- My name in Mayan phonetics
	It happened at
	E-lu-je -- LJ!
Distance number
	1 (k'in) and then it happened
	7 Ben. Tzolk'in date.
	6 Mak. Haab' date.
Secondary clause
	He/she/they/it will open
	To destroy-ness -- Half-assed translation of Apocalypto

Translation: On December 7, 2006 gfish posted to LJ. 1 day later, Apocalypto will open.

(Implied: I think we should go, because I've been obsessing over Mayan glyphs recently!)

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

That's really cool.