Maya and Mexican Manuscripts and Calendars : Day Symbols of the Maya Year

Two Books incorporated in one volume. You've heard or read about the Mayan Calendar and prophecies, but how do these people come to the conclusions they write about? And how can we verify their results? This reprint is one manual that can give you an understanding of how the experts read and interpret ancient Mayan calendars and time.

From book 1

It is necessary that I introduce here a Maya calendar, in order that my next point may be clearly understood. To simplify this as far as possible, I give first a table for a single Cauac year, in two forms, one as the ordinary counting-house calendar (Table I), the other a simple continuous list of days (Table II), but in this latter case only for thirteen months, just what is necessary to complete the circuit of our plate.

As explained in my former paper , although there were twenty days in each Maya month, each day with its own particular name, and always following each other in the same order, so that each month would begin with the same day the year commenced with, yet it was the custom to number the days up to 13 and then commence again with 1, 2, 3, and so on, thus dividing the year into weeks of thirteen days each.

From book 2

As the origin and signification of the day and month, names of the Maya calendar, and of the symbols used to represent these time periods, are now being discussed by students of Mexican and Central American paleography, I deem it advisable to present the result of my investigations in this line. The present paper, however, will be limited to the days only, as I have but little to add in regard to the month names or symbols. As the conclusion reached by Drs Seler and Brinton in regard to the order and sequence of the days of the month in the different calendars appears to be satisfactorily established, it will be accepted.

As frequent allusion is made herein to the phoneticism or phonetic value of the written characters or hieroglyphs, it is proper that the writer's position on this point should be clearly understood. He does not claim that the Maya scribes had reached that advanced stage where they could indicate each letter-sound by a glyph or symbol. On the contrary, he thinks a symbol, probably derived in most cases from an older method of picture writing, was selected because the name or word it represented had as its chief phonetic element a certain consonant sound or syllable. If this consonant element were b, the symbol would be used where b was the prominent consonant element of the word to be indicated, no reference, however, to its original signification being necessarily retained. Thus the symbol for cab, "earth," might be used in writing Caban, a day name, or cabil, "honey," because cab is their chief phonetic element.

In a previous work I have expressed the opinion that the characters are to a certain extent phonetic-are not true alphabetic signs, but syllabic. And at the same time I expressed the opinion that even this definition did not hold true of all, as some were apparently ideographic, while others were simple abbreviated pictorial representations. In a subsequent paper expressed substantially the same opinion, and gave as my belief that one reason why attempts at decipherment have failed of success is a misconception of the peculiar character of the writing, which peculiarity is found in the fact that, as it exists in the codices and inscriptions, it is in a transition stage from the purely ideographic to the phonetic. I stated also my belief that the writing had not reached the stage when each sound was indicated by a glyph or sign. This may further be explained by the following illustration:

The conventionalized figure of a turtlehead is the symbol for a "turtle," ak, ac, or aac in Maya; and a conventionalized footprint is the symbol for "step" or "road," be, beil, in Maya. These may be brought together to form the word akyab or kayab, which may have no reference to the original signification of the combined symbols. These two glyphs are, in fact, combined to form the symbol for the month Kayab.