Hi Jonny,
> I note though that your
> information does not address the question as to
> why 3114 BC was the start of a "new creation".
> Obviously the date is a form of retrocalculation,
> but what was the starting point of this
> calculation, that produced the 3114 BC date. A
> calendar after all has to have some anchor point
> in time, so what was this anchor point and what
> influenced that choice of point?
I don't have any of the books referenced by Bernard, unfortunately - I've only got Coe.
He has this to say (pg 50), although this clashes somewhat with Stuart as cited by Bernard:
Quote
Long Count dates inscribed by the Maya on their monuments consist of ... cycles {kins, uinals, tuns, katuns} listed from top to bottom in descending order of magnitude, each with its numerical coefficient, and all to be added up so as to express the number of days elapse since the end of the last Great Cycle, a period of 13 baktuns whose ending fell on the date 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. The starting point of the present Great Cycle corresponds, in the Thompson correlation, to 13 August 3114 BC (Gregorian calendar).
Aveni's "Stairways to the Stars" (pg 43) says:
Quote
The coming together of cyclic periods may seem unimportant to us; for example, it scarcely matters what day of the week coincides with New Year's Day from year to year; but ... for societies whose systems of timekeeping were based on repetitive natural cycles, some of them going all the way back to their mythic creation, the revelation of such fitting together, or "commensurations", in the wandering of their celestial deities would have constituted major discoveries capable of disclosing the secrets of the gods. For example, the Indian calendar tallies a 2,850-year creation cycle made up of 150 Metonic cycles (the time it takes to return a given phase of the moon to the same date of the year), and an even longer cycle of creation, said to have occurred at midnight on February 17-18, 3100 BC, based on combinations of synodic cycles of the planets. The Maya, surprisingly, put the zero point of their calendar only a decade earlier (August 11, 3113 B.C.), though scholars have yet to work out precisely which celestial (or other?) cyclic beginnings came together on that date.
Hermione
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