09/12/2020

In a column in Folha, the spectacular Mayan calendar.

Foto: Wikimedia Commons

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

Writing was invented at least three times: by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC; by the Chinese around 1200 BC; and by the Mayans in Central America around 500 BC.

The Chinese system remains in use, virtually unchanged. Sumerian cuneiform writing, despite having originated most modern alphabets, was forgotten and rediscovered in the 19th century.

The Mayan civilization developed from 2000 BC and reached its peak between 250 and 900 AD. Upon the arrival of the Spanish (early 16th century), their writing was still understood by some of their descendants, but colonization hastened its decline. Only four "books" survived the purges of religious authorities, who saw in the magnificent Mayan glyphs (symbols) the manifestation of the devil, therefore no one would be able to read them.

As with most ancient languages, the first part of the Mayan writing to be deciphered was the numbers and the calendar, in the 19th century. The Maya discovered zero at the beginning of our era, half a millennium before the Hindus, and created a positional numbering system analogous to ours, except that they used base 20 instead of base 10.

Obsessed with time, they devised a spectacular calendar. They named the days using cycles of 13 and 20 days, making 260 names. They also used a 365-day cycle, divided into 18 months of 20 days plus a special 5-day month. The combination of these two counts repeats every 18,980 days (the least common multiple of 260 and 365), a little over 50 years.

For historical records, they used the "long calendar," a complex combination of different cycles, whose beginning they fixed at the creation of the world, which they believed to have been on August 13, 3114. One of these cycles was completed on December 21, 2012, and there was no shortage of people who wanted to see this as a prophecy of the end of the world (they even made a movie about it). But the Mayan calendar has much longer cycles.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.