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THE MAYAN CALENDAR 49<br />
I must admit myself that when I first heard about the gigantic<br />
Mayan numbers I saw no importance in them and simply decided<br />
the ancient Mayas had been addicted to big numbers as<br />
some people are addicted to drugs, religion, or sex. It was only<br />
after I had discovered the Constant of Nineveh and the secret of<br />
the Mayan calendar that my new respect for the achievements of<br />
our ancestors made me ask if there could be some common<br />
knowledge between the Sumerians who counted by sixty and the<br />
Mayas who counted by twenty, while most other people of antiquity<br />
used the decimal system like the Egyptians or counted by<br />
the dozen like the ancient Gauls or Babylonians.<br />
One day as I looked at some notes taken years ago in Paris<br />
during a long discussion with my French specialist in Mayan culture,<br />
I noticed two especially mysterious numbers that had been<br />
found engraved in some Mayan ruins. One was 34,020 millons<br />
of days or about 93 millions of years and the other 147,420<br />
millions of days or a little more than 403 millions of years. Expressed<br />
in sacred years of 260 days,<br />
the second number represented<br />
exactly 567 million years.<br />
It is difficult to blame the archaeologists for ignoring these<br />
numbers. But since I am not an archaeologist and am used to the<br />
huge numbers involved in space exploration, the Mayan numbers<br />
did not discourage me, and before long I saw that the 34,020<br />
million days represented fifteen times the Constant of Nineveh,<br />
while 147,420 million days represented it sixty-five times.<br />
I spent a lot of time pondering why the Mayas would have<br />
used these huge constants before the answer came to me: They<br />
made all their calculations by 26 or 260 conjunctions. So they<br />
needed a constant of the solar system that would be divisible by<br />
260, and since the Nineveh Constant represented for them<br />
312,680 conjunctions, which cannot be divided by either 26 or<br />
260, they invented a new constant of 34,020 millions of days that<br />
represented 180,392 small cycles of 26 conjunctions and another<br />
one of 147,420 millions of days that represented 78,170 great cycles<br />
of 260 conjunctions.<br />
It is surely beyond imagination to think that thousands of<br />
years ago the Mayas could have, all by themselves, calculated a<br />
constant of 147,420 milKons of days—a number that has twelve<br />
digits. But it is even more surprising to see that the same num-
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