396 
Thirteen entities, seven entities, one. So it 
spake when the word came forth at the time 
there was no word. 
The uinal was created, the earth was 
created; sky, earth, trees, and rocks were set 
in order; all things were created by our Lord 
God the Father. Thus he was there in his 
divinity, in the clouds alone and by his own 
effort, when he created the entire world, 
when he moved in the heavens in his divinity. 
Thus he ruled in his great power. Every 
day was set in order according to the count, 
beginning in the east as it is arranged. 
Semantics of the Maya uinal follow 
in part from the circumstance that 
Imix is beginning and Ahau is end in 
numerous implications. The Maya 
combination Ahau Imix was old end- 
ing and new beginning. What is true 
of the uinal in this regard is true also 
of the tun, katun, baktun, pictun— 
always they begin with Imix and end 
with Ahau. But the 20 names which 
compose the uinal have a continuous 
association with 13 numerical coeffi- 
cients, all combinations running out 
in 13) ><°20=2607 days. silihis ‘is\the 
familiar Maya tzolkin. The cycle of 
13 uinal finds its counterpart in cycles 
of 13 tun, 13 katun, etc. Always 
there is a basic construction of 
13-++-7=20, in the days of the uinal, 
the uinal of the tun, the tun of the 
katun, etc. The 20 names and 13 
numbers combine in the invariable 
table of the tzolkin which enters into 
and classifies all measures of time. 
Baktun 13, Era of the World, is 
construed as the end of one baktun 
numbering cycle and the beginning 
of a fresh one. But the seven periods 
of 144,000 days each which carry on 
to Baktun 7 really established the 
end of a pictun. 
What One Ancient Date Reveals 
Even though no inscriptions actu- 
ally survive from early centuries when 
the Maya were laying the founda- 
tions of their science of astronomy, 
we do have one date which I venture 
to call an astronomical bench mark. 
It is recorded with other much later 
dates and connected with one of these 
by a distance number which amounts 
to more than a thousand years. 
ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1948 
Morley was first to decipher the 
inscription on Altars H’ and I’ at 
Copan in abstract terms of Maya 
chronology. Later, Teeple examined 
the intervals just as abstractedly, con- 
cluding properly enough, that they 
dealt with the Copan formula, 149 
lunations=4,400 days. On Moon 
day 22 it could be carried back to 
Maya zero. But Teeple might have 
gone farther. The long interval of 
the inscription amounts to 365,820 
days which is 1,407 times the tzolkin 
as well as 1,005 zodiacal years and 
therefore 201 times 1,820, their com- 
mon multiple. The pictured zodiac of 
13 constellations each trimmed to 28- 
day sections is found in the Peresianus 
Codex. Below the pictures the 1,820- 
day round displays day names across 
5 years of 364 days each. 
The Maya, lacking angle-measuring 
instruments, fell back on the 360-day 
tun, the 364-day zodiacal year and the 
365-day civil year to effect better 
divisions of the uneven tropical and 
sidereal years of nature. With their 
pictured zodiac they could define 
stars along the ecliptic. Compare 
365820 with departure of three planets 
from three positions: 
Star A to Star A..:.. 34 sidereal revolutions 
of Saturn 365812.18 days. 
StaryBatoystaneb ae 1628 sidereal revolu- 
tions of Venus 365812.76 days. 
Star C to opposite... 53844 sidereal revolu- 
tions of Mars 365816.85 days. 
Could this be accidental? And 
what about the distance from Maya 
zero leading to the ancient date? 
11597 Mercury sidereal + 0.0279 
1020180 8796 Mercury synodical —4.6296 
This looks as though some Maya 
calculator thought he could use 100 
times the sidereal period of Mercury 
multiplied by the synodical period, as 
a preface. The hundredth multiple 
smoothed out the difficult decimals. 
An error remained, since the periods 
of Mercury were about 87.9693 days 
and 115.8779 days. 
But why grope in the dark? The 
bench-mark date on Altars H’I’ 
