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Mayan Nomenclature

9781465671240
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
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Overview
Professor Cyrus Thomas is unwilling to see in this anything more than the counters by which to count the days, and denies to it the name of a calendar; but as the system of day numeration is different from the usual system, and is used only for counting days, and as this system counts forward in almost every case in the inscriptions, and in a majority of cases in the Dresden Codex, from a fixed date, 4 Ahau 8 Cumhu, it seems impossible to see any difference between it and a calendar system. It was certainly to be hoped that the designations which Dr. Seler gave to these Maya periods of time in his “Die Monumente von Copan, etc.,” would have been accepted by Americanists, especially since very good reasons were given by Seler for their adoption. But this view does not meet the approval of Dr. Förstemann or Dr. Thomas. The latter in his “Maya Calendar, Part II.,” published in the “Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology,” still calls the period of 20 days a chuen and that of 360 days an ahau, while the former in his article on “Die Lage der Ahaus bei den Mayas,” published in Part I. of the 1904 issue of the “Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,” makes the following statement: “The katun has also been supposed to be 24 × 365 = 8760 days long (and I held this view for a long time), indeed the long period of 52 × 365 = 18,980 days is also occasionally designated with the word, while the sixth multiple of this member or 113,800 is called an ahaukatun.” He uses the terms “day,” “uinal,” and “ahau” for the periods of 1, 20, and 7200 days respectively.

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