Mayan Mathematics: The Dark Side of Zero

Author(s): ROBERT KAPLAN

Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 1999), pp. 27-33
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41212899
Accessed: 14-01-2019 20:26 UTC

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Mayan Mathematics
The Dark Side of /(pro

ROBERT KAPLAN

Mayan symbol for zero was a tattooed man

his head thrown back. Or at least this was
astonishing array of zero symbols. Since the
from about 300 B.c. to 900 A.D. in the Yucatan Pen
any overseas contacts, they provide vivid testim
origin for the concept of zero and its signs. And why
idea not have sprung up in such different culture
India, and the Yucatan - preserved and passed o
dying out there in the minds of many a mute, in
mathematics is our universal language, obscured
dental languages colonizing the time and place
should it not break through with glory, the expressi
altered by those accidents, but the relations so
yond our mortal natures? If we had to give the p
that of a horse, we could say: by Imagination, out of
Although our image of the Maya is one part
conjecture (and these tempered by the fashions a
ing) , it is hard not to believe that they counted a
on it; and what they counted was time. Transpose
starting date for the universe would be August 13
zero day. You wonder how they arrived at it; and

^^ Robert Kaplan has taught mathematics (most recently a

well as philosophy, Greek, German, Sanskrit, and a cou
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This essay is adapted
Natural History of&ro, to be published this fall by Oxford
and Allan Lane/Penguin in Great Britain.

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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

unlikely ever to be satisfied, it might

Archbishop of Armagh, who in the
had been created on October 22, 40
What a feat! For if you can think
have to be able to think both sides
now you do), a task evidently with
ture him at his candlelit desk, the shadows of Latin and Hebrew and
Greek folios falling about him; bent in perplexity over his calculations;
reckoning a final sum; looking up at the flame as revelation dawns - of
course! October 22! And at 6 p.m.!
The Maya scrupulously recorded the dates of important events in
terms of their zero day, in what archaeologists have come to call the Long
Count. Instead of numbering days consecutively from the beginning - a
poor use of the brain so avid for patterns - they divided time into years of
eighteen months (uinal), with twenty days (kin) in each. That made a
360-day year called a tun, and these tun they then grouped by twenties
(katun), so that one katun had 20 χ 360 = 7200 days. Twenty katun in turn
made a baktun, or 400 tun (144,000 days); and they had units larger than
these, up to an alautun of 64,000,000 years.
There were distinct glyphs for each of these groupings. In order to
show on a monument that the day of its erection was, for example,
precisely 1,101,611 days since time began, they would write: 7 baktun
13 katun 0 tun 0 uinal 11 kin (7 χ 400 + 13 χ 20 = 3060 years, each with
360 days = 1,101,600 days; and 11 days more makes 1,101,611 days). The
7, 13, and 11, like all of their numbers, were made up of bars for fives and
dots for ones (so 7 was -n. , 13 was =, and 11 was =); but the glyphs for
zero- crucial in keeping track of missing middle groupings (for instance,
107 as opposed to 17) - were sometimes faces, sometimes full figures,
sometimes like half flowers; and in manuscripts, at times like snail shells
and at times like nothing we can name.
If there were none of the last units, days, the Maya carefully noted this
too with a zero glyph: which tells you that something was going on more

At times, like nothing we can name: an abstracted, lyj^^^ ьл^^^^г^

necklaced tattooed man, and other Mayan symbols for zero. ' (' ) ^^5s^S^i|ÍSi=N^
Drawings by Ellen Kaplan for The Nothing That Is: ^ - wWb ^^^^^^^^^^ГетйО
A Natural History of Zero. f ^ Ч^^^^^^Ш^Ж

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 Mayan Mathematics

significant to them than getting the date right - something with a formal,
ritualistic cast. Keep this in mind as we try to puzzle out the picture of
their world. It has undoubtedly struck you that 360 may be mathemati-
cally convenient for the length of a year, but that it won't keep up with
the recalcitrant nature of things. The sidereal year is roughly 365.242198
days long, so that in less than a katun you would be a hundred kin out in
your reckoning of day length, seasons, and anniversaries. Perhaps this was
why the Maya had another calendar that ran alongside the Long Count: a
"civil" year (the Haab), also of eighteen twenty-day months, but with five
"phantom" days tucked in at the end, so that it was only about a quarter
day short of the solar year (and hence people versed in such matters now
slightingly call the Haab the "vague year").
Important as zero was in anchoring the Long Count, it took on a new
and peculiar significance with the Haab. The first day of each twenty-day
month wasn't numbered 1, but 0; the second 1, and so on, with the
twentieth day numbered 19 (the five-day month at year's end followed
suit). I don't know of another calendar in which the days of the month
begin with zero. We rarely even count years in this retrospective way: only
the sinister example of Pol Pot comes to mind, since he called 1975 the
Year Zero of his reign - the year in which he would purify his enemies
into nothingness.

numbering always suggests a beginning that is no beginning: a

false dawn or overture (so Christopher Robin was all of one when he
had just begun). It is the sort of counting that lies behind a particularly
clever trick of modern magic. Members of the audience each write secret
sentences on slips of paper, seal them, and toss them into a hat. Blind-
folded, the clairvoyant gropes for one at random, with effort intuits its
content, and announces it. "Yes!" says someone in the audience, "that's
just what I wrote!" The mind reader takes off his blindfold, unseals the
slip and reads off the message: it is exactly as he had said. Blindfolded
again, he chooses a second message, holds it unopened, yet somehow,
with his third eye, perhaps, is able to make out its words and declaim
them.

Another audience member, flabbergasted, acknowledges it. On look-

ing, the mind reader confirms his vision. And so it goes on, through one
slip after another, until all know that they are in the presence of the
supernatural. Or are they? It is zero whose power they have felt. The first
message the mind reader deciphered was one that he and his accomplice
in the audience had earlier agreed on. That was the zero message. When
he took off his blindfold, what he read on the slip he had randomly
drawn was the message he would "intuit" next - and so craftily on, declar-
ing the previous message's content as he read out the one that now sat in
its stead.

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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

In the Haab calendar, it was o

previous month put down his bur
month was seated in order to tak
as when old Janus, keeper of doo
the purifications. For the Maya
ious, as Zip acceded to Zotz or Z
events was Zero. A full day for
did as it dragged by? We know th
days at the end of the year, May
combed themselves, nor undertoo
Now, since the Long Count suff
and the Haab reconciled the cycle
had the Maya of still another cale
very important to them: a sacred y
construction tells you a great dea
ing; the concurrence of three
obsession - in dread.

With this third calendar we can't speak of months so much as of two

cycles: one of twenty day names (Imix, Ik, Akbal . . . ) and one of the
numbers 1 through 13. You will appreciate why the Maya held their mathe-
maticians in such high esteem when you learn that the numbers matched
the first thirteen names, then began again with the fourteenth: so that the
day names 14 through 20 (Ix through Ahau) went hand in hand with the
numbers 1 through 7. Then came the first day name, Imix, around once
more, matched now with number 8, and so through the sixth day name
(Cirni) tied to 13. Manik, the seventh day, was now paired with the number
1 - and this staggering offbeat rhythm went on until 13 χ 20 = 260 days
after it started, when Imix stood for the first time again with the number
1 and a fresh sacred year commenced. Any combination of number and
name would tell you precisely which day of this year it stood for - if you
had the knack of it through insight or arduous training.

such a bizarre calendar? Perhaps because for the Maya there

were thirteen gods of the upper world, while twenty was the num-
ber of man (not an uncommon assignment, given ten fingers and ten
toes) . This interlacing of the two cycles may therefore have been meant
to harmonize the secular and the divine. There were also nine gods of
the underworld in the Mayan pantheon; they had skeletal lower jaws and
were ruled by the Death God. So is it any wonder that the Maya had a
fourth calendar too, a cycle of nine glyphs representing the Lords of the
Night, who ruled each day in turn? And a lunar calendar of 29- and 30-
day months; and a sixth calendar, based on the 584-day synodic cycle of
Venus (its apparent oscillation from one side of the sun to the other)?
Although theirs is the only culture to have institutionalized such a

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 Mayan Mathematics

complex obsession with counting, surely each of us has succumbed at one

time or another to its compulsive insistence, telling off the seconds, the
cracks in the sidewalk, the patternless holes in the dentist's ceiling tiles;
and always what begins in jest ends in earnest, needing no little effort to
turn off the machine as we begin to count its counting, to doubt it and
double back, to lose our way and wish it done with, in vain, until we
recognize that servant and master have changed places and we are no
more than the housing for a relentless automaton.
Some have reached an accommodation with their monster: Sir Francis
Galton, cousin of Darwin and the father of eugenics, counted everything
in sight and even had gloves made up for him with pistons that drove ten
separate counters, so that he could unobtrusively keep track of the per-
centage of beautiful women in Macedonian villages while tallying up the
average price of goods in their shop windows. Others have just given
themselves up, like the otherwise lumpish farmhand Jedediah Buxton,
who in the eighteenth century couldn't help calculating how many hair-
breadths wide was every object in his path; and who, when treated to a
trip to London to see the great Garrick in a play, announced at its end
precisely how many words each actor had spoken, and how many dance
steps each had taken. We hear tales linking autism's estrangement to a
preternatural fascination with, and skill at, counting; we remember
Freud, in his old age, insisting that rhythmic repetition was the expres-
sion of our longing, even beyond pleasure, for sameness, and sameness
was the emissary of death.

can't, however, dismiss the Maya as suffering from some sort of

collective arithmomania, since it wasn't so much the counts as their
coincidings that mattered to them. And here once again we have to
admire their mathematical skills. If the 365-day Haab and the 260-day
Tzolkin began together, when would the first day of each next be the
same? Put the problem with more manageable numbers to see how to
solve it: when will a two-day and a five-day cycle coincide? Clearly, after
2x5 = 10 days: 10 is their least common multiple. And four- and six-day
cycles? 4 χ 6 = 24 is their product, yet 24 isn't the answer: they will first
coincide after 12 days, because you have to divide the product by 2, since
2 is the greatest common divisor of 4 and 6. The Maya understood that
since 5 was the greatest common divisor of 260 and 365, the Haab and
the Tzolkin would begin again together after 26Q * 365 = 18,980 days,
which was 52 Haab or 73 Tzolkin years. This period is called the Calendar
Round, and it seems that each completion brought unmitigated cruelties.
Why? Let me add a light patina of unifying conjecture to the scatter of
those that shape our sense of Mayan thought.
The great fear was that time might stop; for since it carried all its sons
away to the pulse of the Long Count, why should the Mayan empire, the

3i

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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

earth, the sky with its countless star

well? To prevent this the Maya t
horrible. First, they transferred th
linear time, which therefore could
might yet at its end. Very well, se
with the first: now time couldn't s
ends of both cycles coincided- an
civil years), the Maya offered up
blood, virgins, hearts cut from livi
themselves with these sacrifices, a
burden of months put wearily dow
The trouble with obsessions is that
ever enough. More cycles, more
greater multiples! Five synodic ye
Haab; 405 lunations were 46 Tzolk
served at Dresden lists multiples of
days; one archaeologist even sugges
of the underworld and 13 of the u
must also have calculated the synod
(Keep in mind how vivid and porte
people from whom it wasn't hidde
there were the divisions of cycles
quarter-points of a katun), their ki
his blood might keep the thirsty g
put it, blood was the mortar of anc
Nothing is ever enough. Their Lo
time wouldn't stop for an immens
find on some of their monumen
come with your new car: if there i
you feel confident that your car w
there is none at 150,000 miles, a
dating system seemed to show that
time's beginning in a stretch ahead
years. By comparison, our own c
billion years ago (1.2 χ 1010). But li
ers within drawers of a tumbled
became thought of as no longer lin
immensely long spans, which ha
reach cyclically forward forever
insurance policies on their insuran
A wonderful advantage lay in r
periodic. Not only would the threat
the birth of a great ruler could be
agile enough) to have fallen precise

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 Mayan Mathematics

say, the birth of a mythical ancestress - the significance being that the
time span was an integral multiple of several cycles: the Haab and the
Tzolkin, the synodic period perhaps of Mars and of Mercury to boot.
Such good fortune in catching the crest of the polyrhythms was appar-
ently taken to show that the birth was a rebirth: the human Pacal, greatest
of all of Palenque's rulers, was his divine ancestress.
Once you let the analogy "A is like B" turn into "A is B," imagination
hardens into the excesses of fantastic conviction, and the catch on the
box that stores the demonic snaps open, letting Hell loose. I mentioned
that the gods of the underworld, the nine Lords of the Night, were ruled
by the Death God - but I didn't tell you who this death god was: he was
Zero. His was the day of the Haab when time might stop. His was the end
of each lesser and greater cycle: fearful pause. Now if a human were
found who could take on Zero's persona - and if he could be put to
ritualistic death - then Death would die!

that, it seems, is just what the Maya were up to. They had a ritual
ball game between a player dressed as one of their hero twins and
another dressed as the God of Zero. The ball was an important hostage,
such as a defeated king, who had been sequestered for many years and
was now trussed up for the occasion. The two
players skillfully passed and kicked and beat him
to death, or killed him in the end by rolling him
down a long flight of stairs; and it was the hero
twin who always won by outwitting Zero. In other
such games, the loser was sacrificed. But outwit-
ting death wasn't enough. A human would be
dressed in the regalia of the God of Zero, and
then sacrificed by having his lower jaw torn off.
As with most religions, the failure of ritual to
achieve its aim didn't alter it, since even the bar-
barous live in hope. Anthropologists of another
generation, following Ruth Benedict, would have
called the high culture of the Maya DionysianThe - God ofZjro.
but that, I feel, is a slur on Dionysus. This blood-
Illustration by Ellen Kaplan.

soaked society, with its glyphic wit - so clever at numbers, so artful in

building, so apt at astronomy - reminds me of a brilliant and very neu-
rotic friend I had who appeared one day without his tics and twitches.
What had happened?
"I traded all my neuroses in," he explained, "for one little psychosis,
and now my life makes sense."

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