A Reel in the Years Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Both the Sacred Calendar and the Vague Year originated with the Olmecs and spread to the rest of Mesoamerica. As the Maya were the most advanced civilization until the Aztecs, no one else matched their zeal for timekeeping.

Within the 52-year Calendar Round, each date could be uniquely referred to, and every date across five decades (most of a lifetime in those days) would have the same degree of association we have with, say, February the 2nd. In some early cultures, children were literally named for the date they were born. The five-day wayeb, being "out of sequence," was a particularly ugly omen, and being born then was a dire prophecy. The end of each Calendar Round was a time for, you guessed it, sacrifices and tributes to the gods to ward off the bad omens.

The Maya calendar was ingenious, but without the Long Count, it's only really good for tracking the passage of planting-time and harvest-time. Despite some shady historians who'll tell you the Maya were priestly astronomers, all Mesoamerican groups that we know of routinely engaged in conquest. What's a Maya king to do when he wins a great battle? Why, brag about the date it happened, of course!

The beautiful ornamental stelae we see depicting the accomplishments of kings always included Long Count dates. Because the use of Long Count itself was itself a marker of status, the date recorded itself was ornamented in inscriptions. A half-dozen or more "supplemental" characters could be added, giving the names of kings, moon phases, "Lords of the Night" (a set of nine gods), and so forth. Not so impressed with your Excel spreadsheet anymore, are you?

And similarly, Mayan myths were tied to dates. The current, "Fourth Creation" (previous incarnations are told in Mayan legends like the Popol Vuh) began on August 14th, 3114 B.C. Thirteen b'aktun, or 1,872,000 days later, happens to fall on December 21st, 2012, a date that will live in infamy as the subject of that terrible Roland Emmerich film. If there was a reason this date was picked, it probably was an astronomical one, but I'm not convinced there was a reason despite the intriguing efforts of John Major Jenkins (see his "How and Why of the Mayan End Date").

To clarify, the Maya didn't necessarily think that 12/21/2012 would bring Armageddon. Given the Maya's overall cyclical conception of time (contrasting our linear, sequential conception), many scholars think this date would be treated as an anniversary of creation. They might not necessarily have celebrated it, given what they thought of the wayeb and the Calendar Round, but saying they "predicted" any particular calamity is misleading.

To this day, the modern descendants of the Maya, who live in Guatemala, use a modified version of the original Mesoamerican calendar, performing rituals during the wayeb. You can even buy printed versions of the tzolk'in. The last page of each calendar prophesizes that the enraged Vision Serpent will rain flaming tar on the earth on December 31st, adding to the trend of shameless clickbait calendars... just kidding. I imagine the print tzolk'ins end with a reminder to order your calendar for next tun.