48 THE INSCRIPTIONS AT COPAN. 
words, when we count the time of day we refer to elapsed, not current, time. 
This same method is used in reckoning astronomical time. During the 
passage of the first hour after midnight the hours are said to be zero, the time 
being counted by the number of minutes and seconds elapsed. Thus half 
past 12 is written o 30™"* 0%. Indeed, in this method 1 hour can not 
be written until the first hour after midnight is completed or until it is 
i. clock, namely.#1')- 07 410, 
And so it was with the Maya. The time periods recorded refer to 
elapsed, not current, time, and since the Maya did not subdivide the day 
(at least periods smaller than the day have not yet been found in the records 
which have come down to us), the day is the basic unit of their count. 
In speaking of a date as “in Cycle 9” in this memoir, what is really 
meant is that such a date is in the tenth cycle. However, in order to preserve 
the association of the Maya numerals actually recorded, it will be under- 
stood that dates thus described occurred in the period following the numeral 
actually recorded; as Katun 15 for a date in the sixteenth katun or Katun 18 
for a date in the nineteenth katun. 
The basic unit of the Maya Calendar then was the day, and Maya dates 
were recorded by stating how many days, expressed as so many cycles of 
144,000 days each, so many katuns of 7,200 days each, so many tuns of 
360 days each, so many uinals of 20 days each, and so many kins (odd 
number of days under 20) had elapsed since the starting-point of their 
chronology to reach the date recorded. 
This method of dating is identical with the use of the Julian day by 
modern astronomers and chronologists, the corresponding Julian day of 
any date giving the total number of days which have elapsed from the 
starting-point of the Julian Period, 4713 B. c., tothe given date. In recording 
dates in our own Christian chronology we follow a similar, though not an 
identical, practice. 
In writing .1916 A. D., Sunday, January 1, for example, we understand 
that 1 period of a thousand years, 9 periods of a hundred years, 1 period of 
ten years, and 6 periods of one year have elapsed since the birth of Christ— 
the starting-point of our chronology—to reach the current day, which is 
Sunday, the first day of the month of January. 
In this latter case, however, the basic unit of the count is the year, not 
the day, as in the Julian and Mayan Periods. Indeed, in our own method 
of writing dates there is no direct record of the fractional parts of a year, 
1. €., the number of days in the new year to reach the date recorded; and this 
information has to be calculated from the month date given. For this reason, 
as often claimed, the Maya kept a more convenient record of the total 
number of elapsed days since the beginning of their chronology than we can 
by our system, complicated as the latter is by the bissextile element. 
The Bowditch method of transcribing Maya dates is the only one now 
in use, having entirely replaced the clumsy system devised by Goodman or 

‘Morley, 1915, pp. 46-48. 
