here are passages from Stuart's The Order of the Days

Stuart pp.171-
“As a tally of days, the Long Count calendar had some sort of beginning, or base date, after which the days, winals, tuns, k’atuns, and bak’tuns accumulated over time. As we’ve already noted, that base date, according to the correlation of calendars first proposed by Goodman over a century ago, corresponds to the day August 11,3114 BC, two and a half millennia before Maya civilization came into being, and well before complex society of any sort arose anywhere in Mesoamerica. It’s a mythical date, which in many of our later discussions I’ll refer to as the “Creation base date,” to distinguish it from some other foundations of counts that will come into the picture a bit later. Whoever invented the Long Count system clearly opted to have the calendar’s historical onset take place in midstream, centuries after this base date. Let’s say, just for the sake of illustration, that the calendar’s inventors lived around 350 BC—an arbitrary choice on my part—and therefore proposed the beginning for their new ritual calendar to fall on an upcoming round date associated with a sacred number, say 7.0.0.0.0. This would have set things off on their regular course, and would also have necessarily set a base date for the entire system, falling exactly 7 bak’tuns into the past, or a little less than 2,800 years. I have no idea why any such certain starting point would have been chosen, but clearly some decision like this had to have been made in Mesoamerica’s remote past. The base date of the Long Count system, then, is by nature an artificial construct.
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p. 173 “Did the earlier Olmec invent it? We cannot say, but the geographic distribution of the earliest Long Count dates is suggestive. The calendar was in place and written on stone monuments in the isthmus area by 200 to 100 BC. It may well have existed among the Preclassic Maya at roughly the same time, but we lack good direct evidence of this.. . [Earliest Long Count date from Chiapa de Corzo] Only one date will work—7.16.3.2.13 6 Ben 16 Xul—falling in 37 BC. This is the earliest extant Long Count date so far discovered in Mesoamerica.

Stuart pp. 184-185 “As mentioned earlier, the most significant stations of the Long Count are what we call period endings, when periods such as the tun, k’atun, or bak’tun reached a rounded position, usually celebrated most when their number was divisible by five. For example, the Long Count date 9.16.5.0.0 8 Ahaw 8 Sotz’ is a period ending, when the first five tuns of the k’atun were completed. Other period dates are easy to spot, such as 9.6.0.0.0, 8.19.10.0.0, or 9.12.0.0.0. The Maya certainly too notice of these subdivisions of time, each of which was in essence an anniversary of the “zero day” of the Creation, worthy of numerous ceremonial events and performances. . .
Not all period endings were created equal. Tun and k’atun endings falling on 0,5,10,13, and 15 seem to have been especially important. Perhaps the most ritually significant k’atun ending of the Late Classic period was the end of k’atun 13 on 9.13.0.0.0 Ahaw 8 Who, which fell on march 13, AD 692. This was celebrated throughout much of the Maya world as an important “cosmic” number, for as we have seen, the number 13 holds obvious importance in archaic Maya numerology, with its associations with the date of creation (13.0.0.0.0), as well being a main factor in defining the 260-day sacred round. With the approach of 9.13.0.0.0 8 Ahaw 8 Who, a number of kingdoms prepared great sculptural and architectural monuments. At Palenque, for example, the local king and his priests and nobles constructed three elegant temples for the occasion, each dedicated to one of the city’s patron gods known as the Palenque Triad (we will revisit them in chapter 7). The three pyramids are today collectively known as the Group of the Cross, and the carved tablets in each recount an epic myth concerning the origin of the gods in primordial time. In some real sense, I believe that the Maya of Palenque viewed the historical date 9.13.0.0.0 as numerological reflection of that distant Creation, which motivated the construction of what amounted to three cosmic temples associated with the origin of the world.
Each and every period-ending date, such as 8.19.0.0.0 or 9,16.0.0.0 falls on the day Ahaw in the 260-day cycle. The reason for this is purely mathematical since both the winal period and the list of day names span twenty days. This juxtaposition of number and name created an extremely important symbolic association where the day meaning “Lord” would forever be linked to the key station of the Long Count (Ajaw being the ancient variant of the later day name Ahaw). In this way, the k’atun periods and their subdivisions were “ruled” by particular Ahaw dates. .. . . One of the principal duties of the Maya kings—in addition to ruling the community, waging war, and the like— was to tend time, ensuring its good health as yet another manifestation of k’uh, the sacred order of things.
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Stuart makes the point that descriptions of events before 3114 BC indicate that it was not the real zero point

p. 247 [“pre Creation” dates emphasize the, by now obvious, point that the base date 3114 BC was in no way the starting point of calendar systems] These mythical episodes indicate that well before all the gods were arranged in their proper order, and well before the three stones of the Creation hearth were dedicated, gods and heroes were active in primordial time, a period of ancient “prehistory.”
In the three famous temples of the Group of the Cross at Palenque, for example, one tablet opens with the Long Count Date 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahaw 18 Tzek. The bak’tun unit is set at twelve, much higher than we would expect in a historical date, where the bak’tuns are et at eight, nine, or ten, according to the span of recorded Maya history. We might therefore be reasonable in thinking this is a projection far into the future for the Maya scribe who composed it, equal to April 19, 2006. But the Calendar Round is not what we would expect, either. Instead, this is a pre-Creation date, referring to the bak’tun before 3114 BC. Recall that the Creation base date was 13.0 0.0.0 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk’u, implying of course that any date before that would have a bak’tun with a value of twelve. The Palenque date comes some seven and a half years (twenty-eight hundred days) before Creation, and corresponds to the mythical birth of a major creator deity who engendered the three patron gods of the site’s local dynasty, known as the Palenque Triad. As it’s written (without our doing the math), the distant mythical date looks much like a historical one, a mirroring of myth time and real time. This was no doubt intentional.
Another Palenque tablet.. . follows much the same pattern and makes even more overt links between myth and history. Temple XIX was a shrine built late in Palenque’s history, in AD 734, during the reign of a king K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Nahb. He was likely the grandson of the famous ruler Pakal, and nephew of K’inich Kan Bahlam, who oversaw the dedication of the three principal temples of the Group of the Cross. . . .[figures surrounding his accession]
A long text uniting themes of myth and history accompanies the scene, opening with one more odd-looking Long Count: 12.10.1.13.2 9 Ik’ 5 Mol. This is, once again, a pre-Creation date, corresponding to March 8, 3309 BC, when, reading on in the text, we find that the God GI, a solar deity who was the principal member of the Palenque Triad of gods, was “seated in the kingship. . . in the resplendent sky”— evidently there were kings before Creation, though it’s difficult to say what or whom they ruled over. Much later in time, in 2325 BC, we read about the accession to office of the Maya maize god, who earlier had engendered the Palenque Triad gods through his own bloodletting and sacrifice in the post-Creation world. This took place on the date 2.0.0.10.2 9 Ik’ Seating [0] of Sak. And later still we read about the accession to office of the Palenque king K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Nahb, on the day 9.14.10.4.2 9 Ik’ 5 K’ayab, or December 28, 721. Now, look closely to see what might link these three dates spanning four thousand years. You’ll notice that the dates look quite different save for their common position in the 260-day round. This establishes that the accession of the maize god in 2325 BC and the historical crowning of Palenque’s king in AD 721 are both tzolk’in (260-day) anniversaries of the foundation seating of the God GI, well before Creation ever occurred.
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The following passages deal with the role that the Maya kings played in “creating and maintaining the calendar”

p. 254 Kings and the mechanisms of sacred time were reliant upon one another in a way that sees strange to Western concepts of authority and divine rule. On the one hand, time periods, as animate beings in some sense, depended on kings to oversee their proper development and growth. The ritual texts of the Classic period make frequent references to kings overseeing the completion of time periods as if they were tending to a cornfield, and “harvesting” time once the cycle of growth was complete. Rulers also had the duty to mark time’s passage through the erection of stone monuments, many of which still dot the ruins of Maya cities. On the other hand, this basic duty of kingship allowed rulers to demonstrate the sacred underpinnings of their royal office. As far as the Long Count is concerned, I don’t think it much of an exaggeration to say that for the ancient Maya, the calendar was kingship, and kingship was the calendar.. . .
The basic title for Maya kings was k’uhul ajaw “holy lord” [emblem glyphs basic component – emblem for Palenque would read K’uhul Baakal Ajaw (holy Baakal Lord)]. The adjective k’uhul derives from the noun, k’uh meaning “god” and emphasizes the fundamental divinity of kings, as opposed to other nobles and lords, who would have existed at any of the numerous royal courts of he Classic period. . . larger class of nobles who went by the more general honorific term ajaw, “noble” or “lord”; ix ajaw “noblewoman” was its female form. The word probably conveys an idea of mastery or ownership over others, as indicated by its meaning when used in some present-day Mayan languages. . . .
[kings were not ceremonial figureheads but managed the state, but not part of the religion like day keepers]. .

p. 256- 262 To begin to grasp this connection between rulers and time periods, it is important to recall that all period endings occur on the same day of the 260-day cycle, Ahaw. Any tun, k’atun, or bak’tun ending, up to the highest period of the Grand Long Count, fell on this single day sign. The name of the day in Yukatek, Ahaw, is the same word we find in the ancient texts as a basic title for rulers, ajaw, “lord, noble.” the symbolism of this association must have been intentional, since these days were, like the year bearers of central Mexico, the “rulers” of the period. And by extension this idea came also to involve the kings themselves, the k’ubul ajawoob, who upon assuming the throne likewise took on significance as rulers or patrons of tuns, k’atuns, and other time periods. . . .
The k’atun periods themselves were considered rulers who were enthroned every twenty years, depicted as animate characters, a series of individual lords who sit upon cosmic thrones.. . .
By the Late Classic era, the Long Count calendar was a political tool and artifact, a conscious reflection of the ruler’s desire to be seen somehow as embodiments of cosmic time and its recurrent cycles. . .

pp. 264— 266 [rituals and rites; altar El Cayo Aj Chak Wayib] sits before a small stone table that supports an elaborate ceramic brazier. The table is perhaps the carved altar itself (a typical Maya use of self-reference in art), and upon it he casts a number of small pellets of incense from his outstretched hand. The caption above the scene states that the ceremony is called k’atuun¨”stone-binding,” taking place “when 15 k’atuns end” or are “re-planted.” What does this mean precisely? First of all, it is important to point out the similarity between the words k’atun and k’altuun is not coincidental. The word used in ancient Yucatan for the twenty-year-period derives literally from k’altuun, “twenty tuns, which is in turn related to the more archaic phrase k’altuun “stone binding,” which we see in the hieroglyphs. . . “Stone binding” was a direct description of one of the most important calendar ceremonies from the Classic period, when sacred stones that symbolized the individual time periods were ritually bound or wrapped. It was one of the ways, also, that Creation was described on a stela from Quirigua, where we read of three stones being bound or collected together in 3114 BC.. . .
The so-called scattering ritual depicted on the El Cayo altar and on many stelae was also tremendously important. Texts mention that this involved the casting of a certain type of small incense or resin called ch’aah, and usually this would have been thrown into a large brazier or container of ritual fire. In other cases it may refer to the sprinkling of blood droplets in self-sacrifice by the king. . .
This important notion that kings were world renewers resonates with what we’ve already learned about them and their ritual duties elsewhere in Mesoamerica. This very concept underlies the New Fire ceremony of the Aztecs, for example, when every fifty-two years (that is, a full Calendar Round) the world was reborn anew. Maya period endings occurred with far more frequency, but I see similar principles at work in their symbolism.
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pp. 266- . . . much of their royal ritual involved important metaphors of supernatural; birth. We see this perhaps most commonly in the iconography of snakes and serpents. These supernatural “great snakes”, as they were called, served as conduits for communication with the supernatural. Their open maws often hold images of people or gods who are “born” or conjured by a king or some other noble person, often as part of a period-ending rite. A stela from Copan shows a standing king cradling a two-headed snake in his arms; from the open mouth of the snake come the two gods known as paddlers, the two beings who played such an instrumental role in the dedications of stones at the time of 3114 BC Creation event.. . . .
Texts that accompany such odd scenes of giant two-headed snakes refer to the act of “conjuring” god (k’uh) and ancestral spirits (k’awiil). The hieroglyph used to write this action is the “fish-in-hand” sign, which, before it was actually deciphered, was long known to be a glyph associated with bloodletting and other ceremonies of sacrifice. Not long ago, I and others finally deciphered this curious glyph as the word tzak, meaning “to conjure something from nothing.” As I later noticed, the same word, tzak, exists in modern Tzeltal Mayan, used for counting the number of times one grabs a fish out of water with one’s hand, thus explaining the form of the sign. Evidently, “conjuring” a god was likened to the task of wrenching an elusive, slippery fish out of the water, from one realm to the other... .
. . . . . [Prophecy as History]
pp. 277- 278 [Copan Altar Q extremely symmetrical 16 rulers and then Copan abandoned] Once again, time may have much to do with this sense of historical closure. According to the history recorded on the top of Altar Q, the founder K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ arrived in Copán in AD 427, after a long journey from a distant ceremonial locale, perhaps Teotihuacan. Wherever his starting point, he “received k’awiil” at that highland Mexican city, evidently an initiation ritual of some type. His arrival to Copán came on 8.19.11.0.13 5 Ben 11 Muwan, only several years prior to a Long Count station of great significance: 9.0.0.0.0, coming in the year 435. According to many later Copan texts, K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ oversaw this key period ending along with his son, whom we only call Ruler 2. A monument showing the father and the son was dedicated in the plaza below the acropolis, where generations later, a tall stela was erected to commemorate the same date, in retrospective fashion. All signs point to the bak’tun ending being the defining moment in the career of K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ as the founder of the dynasty.
His distant successor in office, Yaz Pasaj Chan Yopaat, ruled from 763 to at least the year 810, when we find the very last mention of him in the historical record. This came only twenty years before the end of the next bak’tun, and a mere eleven years before the one-bak’tun anniversary of the founder’s arrival in Copan. In other words, 95 percent of the entire span of the bak’tun from 9.0.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.0.0 neatly encompass Copan’s ruling dynasty; the final 5 percent represents a lack of any evidence whatsoever. This correspondence between the beginning and ending of the bak’tun with the rise and fall of Copan’s rulers is striking, and very unlikely to be coincidental.. . .
pp. 281- The notion that Maya history was to some extent determined by the calendar’s prophetic structure, and not just measured by it, isn’t at all new. . . [Ralph Roys raised point based on his knowledge of Books of Chilam Balam] and my late friend David Puleston proposed an even more radical notion based on the same idea, suggesting that the famous Maya collapse itself could be explained in part by the built-in, self-fulfilling nature of Maya cyclical history. To Puleston, the collapse may well have been “fully anticipated by ancient Maya scholars and priests, who by means of consultation =s with their books and prophesies were well aware of their impending fall.”. . . .Interestingly, few archaeologists hold much stock in the idea that the multiple rises and falls of the ancient Maya might be closely tied to these inner workings of the abstract calendar and concepts of prophecy. The collapse of Classic Maya culture is widely seen instead as a systemic failure of leadership and authority, where factors such as population pressures, warfare, and environmental degradation brewed together and reached a critical mass, forcing thousands of people to flee cities and towns, leaving the ideology of kingship—and the Long Count calendar so closely tied to it—with no reason to continue. I agree with this scenario in many ways but I’m also inclined to think that the mechanisms of time were also part of this fateful mix."
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