Thursday, March 7, 2024

Jerry D. Grover on the Use of Multiple Calendars at the One Time in Mesoamerica


Combined calendar

 

Mesoamerican Calendar Round

 

The Mesoamerican Calendar Round calendar is a continuous day calendar that was a complex shared calendar as it involved two calendar parts (Sacred and Solar Rounds) that worked together to make a 52-year cycle, such that each day had a unique name. As discussed earlier, the Sacred Round cycle lasted 260 days, and the Solar round was 365 days. There are multiple day counts running concurrently in the Sacred cycle calendar where the 260-day unit that repeats consists of subunits that are also repeating. There is a repeating 20-day unit that has day names, and there is a repeating 13-day subunit that repeats where the days are identified by numbers.

 




 

The Solar Round of 365 days as a whole ran and repeated continuously; however, its underlying subunits did not. It was made up of eighteen months of twenty days each plus a period of five days. So, in this respect there is a portion of this complex calendar where, while the day counts run continuously, some of its subunits do not.

 

The two parts together were used to keep chronologies and king lists, mark historical events, date legends, and define the beginning of the world. The dates were chiseled into stone stelae to mark events, painted on tomb walls, carved onto stone sarcophagi, and written into bark cloth paper books called codices. (Jerry D. Grover, Jr., Calendars and Chronology of the Book of Mormon [Tecumseh, Mich.: Challex Scientific Publications, 2023], 4-5)