Posts Tagged ‘Numbers’
I received a comment over the weekend about the entry Tzolkin #1 - The Mayan Numbering System. Apparently I didn’t clarify the information properly, which I will blame on being lazy. I did intend to cover more information from the beginning including some basic mathematics, but since I took the easy route I need to make sure I cover that information now. I will cover this quickly so I can get started on something new. I have to make up for a few days of downtime as a result of going camping.
The Maya counted a dot as 1 and a line, or bar as 5 as we covered in the already. When you count a 6 you use a bar with a dot stacked on top. When you count 11 you use 2 lines and a dot stacked upon those. If you would like to see what the numbers 0 through 19 look like refer to the link in the paragraph above.
This is the beginning of a new series based entirely around the 260-day Tzolkin, or “Sacred Calendar” of the Maya. The first part of this series will focus on the numbering system of the Maya. In order to understand some of the basics behind the Tzolkin I will be covering this little bit of information first. Each dot was used to represent a 1, and each bar was used to represent a 5. They would stack the numbers as they counted higher, refer to the image below to see an example of this.
As you can see, once they reached a count of 5 they would stack the next set of dots on top of the new bar. Instead of using 4 bars to count for 20 they would simply place one dot in a new place (20’s) above. For every 20 that was counted a new dot, or bar was placed in the 20’s position above the 1’s position. The Maya used a position for the 1’s, the 20’s, the 400’s, the 8000’s, et cetera. Each position would have a number between 0 and 19, once it received a 20 a dot would be used to count once in the power above. By using this very powerful system this gave the Maya the ability to calculate very mathematical equations very quickly.
The Tzolkin uses the Mayan numbers 1 through 13, so understanding all of this wont be required in order to understand the functionality.
If you would like to read more about this information you can do so by reading the entry titled Number Clarity
