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How did the Maya count in ancient times? How many bags of corn did they have? How many did they sell? Did all the crops arrive at the city market? To answer these important daily questions, they used some numbers like this:

The Maya was good at math. They counted in groups of 20, not 10. They wrote numbers in columns going up. The bottom row was the “ls” column, the next row up was 20s, then 400s, and so on. For numbers, they used a dot () for 1, a line for 5, and a shell () shape to show zero. Numbers 1 to 19 were written with a combination of lines and dots. Can you read the number in the following picture? It’s the number 1209(three 400s + no 20s + nine 1s).

The Maya also kept three different calendars. The first divided the year into 18 months of 20 days each, plus a short month of 5 days. The short month was believed to be unlucky, a time when spirits walked.

The second calendar repeated every 260 days. This was used to plan religious activities.

When talking about events long ago, they used a calendar called “the long count.” This had a span of about 5,136 years. Year 1 on this calendar was 3114 BCE on our calendar.

Each city and village had a calendar keeper, who was in charge of saying when to celebrate holidays and when to expect rain or plant crops. But farmers could probably also tell the time of the year from the sun and stars.

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