At its height, the pre-Columbian civilization of the Mayans flourished with expansive kingdoms and impressive works of architecture, a highly civilized society skilled in architecture and astronomy, and known, perhaps notoriously and sensationally, for their aggressive and violent city-states. However, today many people are familiar with the exquisitely detailed Mayan Calendar, brought forth dramatically into the limelight with the oft-misinterpreted date of December 21, 2012, the upcoming End Era for the Mayans, interpreted sensationally by many (2012 movie, anyone?) to be the apocalypse. The new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is even based around the Mayan myth that 13 crystal skulls can save humanity from certain doom. This myth says that if the 13 ancient skulls are not brought together at the right time, the Earth will be knocked off its axis. These might be great plotlines for blockbuster movies, but it also highlights the hype that can be stirred, lighting up religious, scientific and not-so-scientific ideas that the world is doomed.

Studio Avante, an iPhone app developer based in Brazil, created Maya 3D for the iPhone so that users may grasp every in and out of the Mayan Calendar, using it like a more advanced horoscope for their daily lives, and thus become familiarized with its benign and spiritual use.

Upon initial viewing, Maya 3D is a beast to behold, prettily rendered, but difficult to understand even with the lengthy diatribes on the Info Pages of the app – it’s, unfortunately, a bit difficult to understand the info pages due to some broken English. When you load the app, the first thing you see is a three-dimensional view of the Mayan calendar with the current date, much like a clock’s face display. As you observe, the calendar is constructed of three moving parts representing different cycles, each cycle being one gear in the clock. If you touch a gear, you can see the name of the cycle and drag it forward and backward in time. The figures, known as glyphs, at the point where the gears intersect display each cycle’s current day. The current day will always correspond with the current date and time registered on the iPhone. For navigation purposes, four tabs are located at the bottom of screen – 3D clock, Mayan glyphs, daily oracle, date explorer – and they will return you to the main screen showing the 3D calendar, elucidate on what specific glyphs mean, give horoscope projections for the day, and provide a date calibration device for the calendar, respectively.  A Datebook is also available to keep record of commonly used dates, like birthdays and historical events related to the Mayan calendar, which you may access with a tab in the upper right hand corner of the main screen.

Since interpreting the Mayan calendar is no small feat, I will write a quick overview. The Mayans used many different calendars and viewed time as a meshing of spiritual cycles. While the calendars had practical uses, such as social, agricultural, commercial and administrative tasks, there was a very heavy religious element. Each day had a patron spirit, signifying that each day had specific use. This contrasts greatly with our modern Gregorian calendar, which primarily sets administrative, social and economic dates.

Most of the Mayan calendars were short. The Tzolk’in calendar lasted for 260 days and the Haab’ approximated the solar year of 365 days. The Mayans then combined both the Tzolk’in and the Haab’ to form the “Calendar Round”, a cycle lasting 52 Haab’s (around 52 years, or the approximate length of a generation). Within the Calendar Round were the trecena (13 day cycle) and the veintena (20 day cycle). Obviously, this system would only be of use when considering the 18,980 unique days over the course of 52 years. Using the Calendar Round is great if you simply wanted to remember the date of your birthday or significant religious periods, but what about recording history? There was no way to record a date older than 52 years.

The Mayans had a solution. Using an innovative method, they were able to expand on the 52 year Calendar Round. Up to this point, the Mayan Calendar may have sounded a little archaic – after all, it was possibly based on religious belief, the menstrual cycle, mathematical calculations using the numbers 13 and 20 as the base units and a heavy mix of astrological myth. The only principal correlation with the modern calendar is the Haab’ that recognized there were 365 days in one solar year (it’s not clear whether the Mayans accounted for leap years). The answer to a longer calendar could be found in the “Long Count”, a calendar lasting 5126 years.

I’m personally very impressed with this dating system. For starters, it is numerically predictable and it can accurately pinpoint historical dates. However, the Mayan numeral system is vigesimal, meaning it depends on a base unit of 20 (where modern calendars use a base unit of 10). So how does this work?

The base year for the Mayan Long Count starts at “0.0.0.0.0″. Each zero goes from 0-19 and each represent a tally of Mayan days. So, for example, the first day in the Long Count is denoted as 0.0.0.0.1. On the 19th day we’ll have 0.0.0.0.19, on the 20th day it goes up one level and we’ll have 0.0.0.1.0. This count continues until 0.0.1.0.0 (about one year), 0.1.0.0.0 (about 20 years) and 1.0.0.0.0 (about 400 years). Therefore, if I pick an arbitrary date of 2.10.12.7.1, this represents the Mayan date of approximately 1012 years, 7 months and 1 day. Phew! Good thing all of this is covered in the Maya 3D app, just make sure you read over it and give yourself a crash course to shed light on the beautiful industrial gear click clacking that is the 3D rendered Mayan calendar.

I remember vividly the first time I walked down the gravel path that led into the ruins of Palenque. Surrounded by vine-shrouded bushes filled with the sounds of playing children, barking dogs, of the chest-deep thumps of tom turkeys, I walked down that path past broken buildings shaded under vine-draped trees until at last I came to the grass-filled plaza in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions. As I walked through the lichen-painted ruins of that magic place, I felt my imagination stirred by the pathos of a lost world. The enchantment of the forest with its emerald green light and towering trees shrouded in a rich world of orchids, bromeliads, and liana vines produced a kind of exotic beauty I had never imagined. The mystery of calcium-heavy water, tumbling down the rocky streams to the plain below Palenque’s escarpments, to encase rock, leaf, branch, and broken temple alike, spoke to my mind in metaphors of creation and destruction.

For this reason alone I was immediately intrigued by the Maya 3D iPhone app. It may not be terribly exciting, and requires thorough reading to understand, but being able to interpret the glyphs and formulate some meaning from this highly ornate system acts like a gateway into the ancient Mayan culture. Even if you do not find much use for the app, perhaps, you too, will feel an eagerness to explore the ruins of Palenque.

*I recommend reading A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of The Ancient Maya by Linda Schele and David Friedel for those interested in a more elaborate discussion of the Mayan culture and calendar.

*information garnered from various Anthropological sources, including Anthropological Essays by Oscar Lewis, Maya History and Religion (Civilization of the American Indian Series) by J. Eric Thompson, and the aforementioned title.