The Maya seem to have used only the former of these two methods in counting
time; that is, all the different periods recorded in the codices and the
inscriptions seemingly refer to elapsed time rather than to current time,
to a day passed, rather than to a day present. Strange as this may appear
to us, who speak of our calendar as current time, it is probably true
nevertheless that the Maya, in so far as their writing is concerned, never
designated a present day but always treated of a day gone by. The day
recorded is yesterday because to-day can not be considered an entity until,
like the hour of astronomical time, it completes itself and becomes a unit,
that is, a yesterday.
This is well illustrated by the Maya method of numbering the positions of
the days in the months, which, as we shall see, was identical with our own
method of counting astronomical time. For example, the first day of the
Maya month Pop was written Zero Pop, (0 Pop) for not until one whole day of
Pop had passed could the day 1 Pop be written; by that time, however, the
first day of the month had passed and the second day commenced. In other
words, the second day of Pop was written 1 Pop; the third day, 2 Pop; the
fourth day, 3 Pop; and so on through the 20 days of the Maya month. This
method of numbering the positions of the days in the month led to calling
the last day of a month 19 instead of 20. This appears in Table IV, in
which the last 6 days of one year and the first 22 of the next year are
referred to their corresponding positions in the divisions of the Maya
year. It must be remembered in using this Table that the closing period of
the Maya year, the xma kaba kin, or Uayeb, contained only 5 days, whereas
all the other periods (the 18 uinals) had 20 days each.
Curiously enough no glyph for the _haab_, or year, has been identified as
yet, in spite of the apparent importance of this period.[31] The {48}
glyphs which represent the 18 different uinals and the xma kaba kin,
however, are shown in figures 19 and 20. The forms in figure 19 are taken
from the inscriptions and those in figure 20 from the codices.
TABLE IV. POSITIONS OF DAYS AT THE END OF A YEAR
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