The Maya: Keepers of the Count — Sleep Podcast

A long bedtime episode for The Slow Ages on the Maya — the people who built a civilisation around counting time, and who kept that count for four thousand years.

We begin on the shore of a great shallow lake, in the lowlands, just before dawn, some centuries ago. From there the hour moves through the riddle at the centre of Maya history: how a people with no telescopes, and a writing system that would remain unread for four hundred years, watched the sky for centuries and wrote the results down. We meet the scribes — the people of the book and brush — and the burned scribes' quarter at Aguateca; we learn their bar-and-dot numbers, the strange place for nothing, and the honest debate over whether that sign was a zero at all. Then the calendars themselves: the 260-day sacred count, the 365-day vague year, the Calendar Round, and the Long Count that runs back to a creation date of 3114 BC. We look at the Dresden Codex's Venus and eclipse tables, the painted astronomer's back-room at Xultun, and the buildings that (maybe) watched the sunrise — and what modern measurement has quietly un-proven about them. The hour closes with the fire at Maní in 1562, the four books that survived, and a calendar that is still kept today, by day-keepers, about feeding and beginning again — never about apocalypse.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About seventy-four minutes.

Sources (a selection):

• Aveni, Skywatchers (UT Press, 2001).
• Aveni, Gibbs & Hartung, "The Caracol Tower at Chichen Itza," Science 188 (1975): 977–985.
• Aveni & Hartung, "Uaxactun, Guatemala, Group E…," World Archaeoastronomy (1989): 441–461.
• Bricker & Bricker, Astronomy in the Maya Codices (APS Memoirs 85, 2011).
• Saturno, Stuart, Aveni & Rossi, "Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun," Science 336 (2012): 463–466.
• Šprajc, Inomata & Aveni, "Origin of Mesoamerican Astronomy and Calendar," Science Advances 9 (2023): eabq7675.
• Blume, "Maya Concepts of Zero," Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 155 (2011): 51–88.
• Rojo-Garibaldi, Rangoni, González & Cartwright, "…Bijective Numeration, and the Mesoamerican Discovery of Zero," arXiv:2005.10207.
• Malmström, Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon (UT Press, 1997).
• Gronemeyer & MacLeod, "What Could Happen in 2012: Tortuguero Monument 6," Wayeb Notes 34 (2010).
• Stuart, The Order of Days (Harmony, 2011).
• Restall & Solari, 2012 and the End of the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
• Tozzer (trans.), Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Peabody Papers 18, 1941).
• Knorozov, "Drevnyaya pismennost' Tsentral'noy Ameriki," Sovetskaya Etnografiya 3 (1952).