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By Nick Bowman

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This website describes what the Mayan Calendar really is and how it was used through time.  One Red Flag that this website may be present too is proof of verbosity. It provides you with so much information that its all too much for one person to comprehend. The Calendar is also provided with a lot of information that may be too much to process as well.

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The Maya calendar is a system of three interlacing calendars and almanacs which was used by several cultures in Central America, most famously the Maya civilization.

©iStockphoto.com/luisrsphoto

The 2012 Phenomenon

The Mayan calendar rose to fame in 2012, when a "Great Cycle" of its Long Count component came to an end, inspiring some to believe that the world would end at 11:11 UTC on December 21, 2012. The media hype and hysteria that ensued was later termed the 2012 phenomenon.

Of course, the predictions did not come true-just like hundreds of other doomsday prophecies that fizzled out in the past.

Not a Mayan Invention

The Mayan calendar dates back to at least the 5th century BCE and it is still in use in some Mayan communities today. However, even though the Mayans contributed to the further development of the calendar, they did not actually invent it. The same system was used by most cultures in pre-Columbian Central America-including those predating the Maya.

Wheels Working Together

The Mayan Calendar consists of three separate corresponding calendars: the Long Count, the Tzolkin (divine calendar), and the Haab (civil calendar). Each of them is cyclical, meaning that a certain number of days must occur before a new cycle can begin.

The three calendars are used simultaneously. The Tzolkin and the Haab identify the days, but not the years. The Long Count date comes first, then the Tzolkin date, and last the Haab date. A typical Mayan date would read: 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Kumku, where 13.0.0.0.0 is the Long Count date, 4 Ahau is the Tzolkin date, and 8 Kumku is the Haab date.

The Haab

The Haab is a 365-day solar calendar which is divided into 18 months of 20 days each and one month which is only 5 days long ( Uayeb). The calendar has an outer ring of Mayan glyphs (pictures) which represent each of the 19 months. Each day is represented by a number in the month followed by the name of the month. Each glyph represents a personality associated with the month.

The Haab is somewhat inaccurate as it is exactly 365 days long. An actual tropical or solar year, the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, takes about 365.24219 days on average. In today's Gregorian calendar, we adjust for this discrepancy by making almost every fourth year a leap year, when an extra day- a leap day-is added on the 29th of February.

The Tzolkin

The Tzolkin, meaning "the distribution of the days," is also called the Divine Calendar and the Sacred Round. It is a 260-day calendar with 20 periods of 13 days, and it is used to determine the time of religious and ceremonial events. The days in each period are numbered from 1 to 13. Each day is also given a name (glyph) from a sequence of 20 day names.

The Long Count

The Long Count is an astronomical calendar which is used to track longer periods of time. The Maya called it the "universal cycle." Each such cycle is calculated to be 2,880,000 days long (about 7885 solar years). The Mayans believed that the universe is destroyed and then recreated at the start of each universal cycle. This belief caused the 2012 phenomenon described above, and it still inspires a myriad of prophecies about the end of the world.

The "creation date" for the current cycle is 4 Ahau, 8 Kumku. According to the most common conversion, this date is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar and September 6, 3114 BCE in the Julian calendar.

How to Set the Date

A date in the Mayan calendar is specified by its position in both the Tzolkin and the Haab calendars. This creates a total of 18,980 unique date combinations, which are used to identify each day within a cycle lasting about 52 years. This period is called the Calendar Round.

In practice, the date combinations are represented by two wheels rotating in different directions. The smallest wheel consists of 260 teeth with each one having the name of the days of the Tzolkin. The larger wheel consists of 365 teeth and has the name of each of the positions of the Haab year. As both wheels rotate, the name of the Tzolkin day corresponds to each Haab position.

The date is further identified by counting the number of days from the "creation date", using the Long Count calendar. A typical Long Count date has the following format: Baktun.Katun.Tun.Uinal.Kin.

The kin, tun, and katun are numbered from 0 to 19; the uinal are numbered from 0 to 17; and the baktun are numbered from 1 to 13. The Long Count has a cycle of 13 baktuns, which will be completed 1.872.000 days (13 baktuns) after 0.0.0.0.0. This period equals 5125.36 years and is referred to as the Great Cycle of the Long Count.

Mayan Culture Today

The Maya still form sizable populations that include regions encompassing present-day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Mexico. They maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs, which was inspired by a combination of pre-Columbian and post-conquest ideas and cultures.

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The Maya calendar is a system of three interlacing calendars and almanacs which was used by several cultures in Central America, most famously the Maya civilization. The Mayan calendar rose to fame in 2012, when a "Great Cycle" of its Long Count component came to an end, inspiring some to believe that the world would end at 11:11 UTC on December 21, 2012.

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This image shows what the Mayan calendar looked like. As described in the previous website it is used by the symbols on the outside ring that describe different things. This Calendar may have flaws because it is based off of symbols and not actual numbered days.

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This website shows what the Mayan calendar had said about the end of the world back in 2012. This is a major flaw within the Calendar seeing that the world did not end in 2012 on December 21st.

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The Mayan calendar ended one of its great cycles in December 2012, which has fueled countless predictions about the end of the world on December 21, 2012 at 11:11(UTC).

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In this video the man describes what the Mayan Calendar is and what it meant for 2012 and the end of the world. One thing he mentions is that it was made by ancient beings which is a red flag of ancient wisdom.

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This image shows how the calendar works with all the moving parts within the calendar itself. This could be a major flaw seeing that there are so many moving parts to this calendar.

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This is probably my favourite video that i have found. He describes how there are many different Mayan Calendars and how there is also one that combines them all. This video shows that many people have misunderstood what the Mayans thought about the end of the calendar and how its a time for celebration not destruction

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This image shows and explains what the Mayan Calendar is and how complicated it is. This being so complicated and in a completely different language could cause for misunderstood meanings or translations.

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This article published in may of 2012 describes how the most recent discovery in guatamala has found the oldest Mayan Calendar they know of to date. Having this calendar be so old could be a major flaw with it being either hard to read because its been so faded or that we just don't fully understand the language.

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A Maya king, seated and wearing an elaborate head dress of blue feathers, adorns the north wall of the ruined house discovered at the Maya site of Xultún. An attendant, at right, leans out from behind the king's head dress. The painting by artist Heather Hurst recreates the design and colors of the original Maya artwork at the site.

Credit: Heather Hurst, copyright National Geographic Society

The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 - the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

"The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around." [ End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]

A brilliant surprise

The newly discovered calendar is complex indeed, featuring stacked bars and dots representing fives and ones and recording lunar cycles in six-month chunks of time. But it wasn't these mathematical notations that first caught the archeologists' eye. William Saturno, an archaeologist from Boston University, was mapping the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala in 2010 when one of his undergraduate students peered into an old trench dug by looters and reported seeing traces of ancient paint.

The discovery was "certainly nothing to write home about," Saturno told reporters on Thursday (May 10), in advance of releasing details of the murals in this week's issue of the journal Science. Paint doesn't preserve well in the rain forest climate of Guatemala, and Saturno figured that the faint red and black lines his student had found weren't going to yield much information. But he felt he had a responsibility to excavate the room the looters had tried to reach, if only to be able to report the size of the structure along with the paint finding.

Conservator Angelyn Bass cleans and stabilizes the surface of a wall of a Maya house that dates to the ninth century. The figure of a man who may have been the town scribe appears on the wall to her left.

Credit: Photo by Tyrone Turner © 2012 National Geographic

As Saturno continued along the old trench to the back wall, he was shocked to run into a brilliantly painted portrait: a Mayan king, sitting on his throne, wearing a red crown with blue feathers flowing out behind him. Another figure peeks out from behind him. On an adjoining wall, three loincloth-clad figures sit, wearing feathered headdresses. One is captioned "Older Brother Obsidian," or "Senior Obsidian," a still-mysterious title. Next to the king, a man painted in brilliant orange wearing jade bracelets reaches out with a stylus, likely identifying him as a scribe. He is labeled as "Younger Brother Obsidian," or perhaps "Junior Obsidian." [ See Photos of the Mayan murals]

It's not the end of the world

These paintings - covering the west and north walls of the small, 6-foot-by-6-foot room - weren't the only surprise Xultun had to offer. On the east wall, someone had painted a series of small, complex hieroglyphics. This, the researchers soon realized, was a calendar.

The calendar seemed to have been added after the murals were completed, as some of the numbers cover up painted figures on the wall. It's almost as if an ancient scribe got sick of flipping through a document to find his timekeeping chart and decided to put it on the wall for at-a-glance reference, Stuart said.

"It's kind of like having a whiteboard in your office where you're writing down formulas that you want to remember," he said.

The Maya recorded time in a series of cycles, including 400-year chunks called baktuns. It's these baktuns that have led to rumors of an end-of-the-world catastrophe on Dec. 21, 2012 - on that date, a cycle of 13 baktuns will be complete. But the idea that this means the end of the world is a misconception, Stuart said. In fact, Maya experts have known for a long time that the calendar doesn't end after the 13th baktun. It simply begins a new cycle. And the calendar encompasses much larger units than the baktun.

Four long numbers on the north wall of the ruined house relate to the Maya calendar and computations about the moon, sun and possibly Venus and Mars; the dates stretch some 7,000 years into the future. These are the first calculations Maya archaeologists have found that seem to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Although they all involve common multiples of key calendrical and astronomical cycles, the exact significance of these particular spans of time is not known.

Credit: Illustration by William Saturno and David Stuart © 2012 National Geographic

"There were 24 units of time they actually could have incorporated into their calendar," Stuart said. "Here, we're only seeing five units and they're still really big."

In one column, the ancient scribe even worked out a cycle of time recording 17 baktuns, the researchers found. In another spot, someone etched a "ring number" into the wall. These notations were used to record time in a previous cycle, thousands of years into the past. The calendar also appears to note the cycles of Mars and Venus, the researchers said. Symbols of gods head the top of each lunar cycle, suggesting that each cycle had its own patron deity.

"There was a lot more to the Maya calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart said.

Scratching the surface

This ancient "wall calendar" is a major find, because the first known calendar and astronomical tables before this time came from the Dresden Codex, a book that dates to the 11th or 12th centuries. Most likely, Saturno said, the wall calendar and the Dresden Codex both arose from earlier books that long ago rotted away. [ 8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

The mural room gives an unprecedented glimpse into the work lives of Mayan scientists, Stuart said. The mural room is in a compound with several other rooms, which were collapsed and built over in later years. The murals only survived, because, instead of collapsing the room, Mayan engineers filled it with rubble and then built on top of it.

"This is clearly a space where someone important was living, this important household of the noble class, and here you also have a mathematician working in that space," Stuart said. "It's a great illustration of how closely those roles were connected in Mayan society."

Kings would have been extremely interested in timekeeping, Stuart said, because part of their job was to conduct rituals of renewal at certain times. Unfortunately, the name of the king pictured in the mural room has been lost.

Although Xultun was first discovered in 1915, less than 0.1 percent has been explored, Saturno said. Looters damaged much of the ancient city in the 1970s, meaning much of historical significance has been lost. But archaeologists still don't even know how far the boundaries of the town extend.

"[That] investigations can begin and in a house like this we can find something we've never seen before only speaks to the great wealth of scientific material that remains in Guatemala in the Maya area for us to discover," Saturno said.

The excavations of the mural room were funded by the National Geographic Society.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter . Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on .

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Nevermind the Apocalypse: Earliest Mayan Calendar Found

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The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest. The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D.

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This video goes in depth about the different symbols on the Mayan Calendar and what each of them mean. This is one of the reasons that people may believe because there is so much detail that goes into these symbols and so this must mean a lot of thought must have gone into this calendar as well.