Mayan Calendar Research Paper

Words: 675
Pages: 3

The ancient Maya kept track of time differently than how we do today. They used a calendar system which had remarkable accuracy and complexity. It was a calendar system that was utilized and expressed in many forms, including pyramid temples which acted as calenders.
The Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá in Yucatan, Mexico was built around sometime between the years 550 to 900 AD. The earliest hieroglyphic date discovered at Chichen Itza dates to 832 AD, when the Toltec culture from Tula became politically powerful and dominated the region.
The pyramid built there has four stairways for each quarter of the year and each stairwell has 91 steps that lead to a platform at the top. This makes for a total of 365 steps/platforms, the same number of days in a calendar year.
The pyramid also has nine main platforms which are thought to represent the 18 months of the Maya calender they called the “haab'.”
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Their temples were aligned to meet the needs of a particular god and accurately counted off the days ever year to mark when the god was to be celebrated. The Maya calendar system was also used by the other Mesoamerican nations, such as the Aztecs and the Toltec. They adopted the mechanics of the calendar, but changed the names of the days of the week and the months to meet their language and cultural differences.
The Maya calendar used a system that moved in cycles, with the last cycle ending on our modern date of December 21st, 2012. This is the last day of the Maya calender which corresponds with the Winter Solstice, which occurs on the date of December 21st. This was the reasoning behind the hype in 2012 about the Maya predicting when the World was coming to an end. This was just a cycle of their calender, which merely mean that the count began again at one.
We're still here, so obviously that wasn't the meaning behind the new cycle of the Maya calendar. The World did not come to an