Here are some passages from Aveni's The End of Time on the point that the Maya's elaboration of the calendar has much in common with many other calendars and should not be subjected to unusual hypotheses. Commensuration of cycles has been used in other calendars. Cyclic-mythic time is involved in many other calendars. Aveni alludes to the role of calendars in justifying the power of rulers among the Maya and other calendars. I'll post separately on that issue.

Aveni p. xvi “the study of “last things” has a name of its own, It’s called eschatology (from the Greek eschatos, meaning furthest in time). Eschatology divides sharply into two doctrines based on how time is understood. The mythic doctrine, widespread in many cultures, sees humanity immersed in a struggle between the forces of order and chaos. People derive meaning from the rituals they conduct to see the world through its impending destruction and the creation of a new world. In most versions, mythic time is cyclic. Destruction and renewal happen over and over again, endlessly. Historical eschatology, derived from Judeo-Christianity, is based on a linear understanding of time. the world will suffer singular destruction because of humanity’s violation of the laws of God, but existence in the eternal world to follow is possible provided we seek salvation and redemption before time’s end.”

Aveni. pp. 65-66 “Before Christianity introduced this linear concept , “big time” in the West was based in the pagan tradition of the Classical world. Time was made up of rhythmic, repetitive events centered on the return or reenactment of earlier events often reckoned by celestial cycles, such as planetary conjunctions. (Recall our definition of the two kinds of time in the Preface—historical-linear and mythic-cyclic). Crossings of Jupiter and Saturn were popular choices in the ancient Chinese calendar, whereas the Chaldeans in the Middle East favored the assemblage of all the visible planets in the constellation of Cancer. The Hindu calendar, on the other hand, was a purely mathematical contrivance based on 1,000-year multiple cycles of years, called yugas. The grandest cycle of time measured in yuga lengths was thought to be a “day” in the life of Brahma. The bigger the tree the deeper the roots. One way or another, all complex civilizations ultimately establish their origins in the very distant past.

The Maya were no different when it came to the subject of time. They wove the history of their dynasties into the fabric of deep time in order to legitimize their right to rule.

Aveni—p. 82 “But why 3114 BC? Anthropologist Prudence Rice thinks the choice had to do with an arbitrary reproduction of some more recent event in Maya history or with a culturally and historically significant date. If it was an arbitrary reproduction, what dates are possible? Rice singles out the date 7.6.0.0.0 11 Ahau 8 Cumku (236 BC) as a possible candidate. For one thing, it falls right around the time when we find the earliest Maya Long Count inscriptions. And for another, it contains a whole number of katuns, an Ahau day name in the tzolkin, and a Cumku day name in the haab. Creation day corresponds with 13.0.0.0.0. in the Long Count and 4 Ahau 8 Cumku in the calendar round, so call it a triple bonus. Maybe, the Maya back-calculated from 7.6.0.0.0 to a zero point that fit all those conditions. A second, les likely possibility that has been mentioned is the date 6.19.19.0.0, which is 1 Ahau 3 Kej in the Olmec version of the calendar round, or 35 BC. This Long Count date is just one tun short of 7.0.0.0.0; it too contains an Ahau creation day name and it corresponds to a winter solstice.

Because it is the sort of thing astronomers enjoy doing, I have also labored extensively over such calculations. I have never been able to find anything of cosmic significance, including the position of the Milky Way or of the zodiac, that fits creation day. The best I (and Rice) can come up with along that line is that the second pair of annual zenith passages—the August 11 date in the general zone of latitude where the Long Count may have originated—falls at a time in the seasonal cycle when people might have wished to come together to celebrate the completion of a successful crop. Not a bad time to re-crank your cycle.

As I said at the outset, deep-time reckoning is a widespread cultural phenomenon and it is often achieved via some sort of commensuration principle. For example, the starting point of the Julian calendar, fabricated in the sixteenth century and still in use by astronomers, is 4713 BC. It was arrived at by rolling back three different time cycles to a point of commensuration. One period included all possible combinations of the days of thee week with the first day of the year, which amounts to twenty-eight years. The second cycle is the Metonic cycle of nineteen years, which tabulates the period over which a given phase of the moon comes back to the same date of the seasonal year. These two cycles are natural astronomical cycles, but the third is decidedly sociopolitical in nature—namely the cycle of indiction, a period of fifteen years that originally marked the collection of taxes to be paid to troops discharged from the army; in other words, a monetary cycle. I cite this example to warn Maya enthusiasts not to rule out the existence of time units that fall outside nature’s realm (Incidentally the commensuration of all three cycles in the Julian calendar [28 x 19 x 15] is 7,980 years; thus in the course of this huge interval no two dates can be written down with identical entries in all three time cycles.)

Great cycles like the Julian era exist in calendars all over the world—Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese, and so on. I had always wondered why so many of them converge on zero points a handful of millennia BC. Could this be deep enough time for most civilizations to reckon in social terms?. . .

To sum up, the lengthening of durational sequences in Maya timekeeping on the doorstep of the Classic period clearly must have been induced by a motive that drove a person or class of persons to propagate the notion that the present can be solidly anchored in the past by projecting events further back than anyone had hitherto contemplated. In the case of our own calendar, the prominence of the sole transcendent figure (Jesus) who lies at the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire takes front and center in the mission widely shared by complex cultures to extend deep time. In this case the Holy Roman emperor was the initiator of the great project of fabricating the architecture of time. I see no reason to think that the Maya were different, and I am convinced that the “bottom line” of the Long Count is directed not to the prediction of the cataclysmic end of time for all of us but rather to time’s beginning and to the exaltation of the ruler who initiated the Long Count project in the first place.”

Bernard