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)
