What is the short story of the Mayan calendar? On Dec. 21, 2012, it will display the equivalent of a string of zeros, like the odometer turning over on your car, with the close of something like a millennium. In Maya calendrics, however, it's not the end of a thousand years. It's the end of Baktun 13. The Maya calendar was based on multiple cycles of time, and the baktun was one of them. A baktun is 144,000 days: a little more than 394 years.
The Mayan Calendar website cites renowned Mayanist scholar Sir J. Eric Thompson to the effect that the baktuns do not end after a cycle of 13, but keep going—20 baktuns make apiktun; 20 piktuns make a kalabtun; 20 kalabtuns make a kinichiltun; 20 kinichiltuns make analautun. (A tun, the Maya word for stone, was basically a year—360 days, so named for the ritual erecting of stones to mark the passing years. A baktun was 400 tuns: 144,000 divided by 360 = 400. A piktun is therefore 8,000 tuns, and so on.) So, obviously, the Mayan "Long Count" that began ticking in 3114 BCE will keep going for many, many centuries into the future.
