How did the Mayans divide the day?

OK, I have no real knowledge of this, but my guess is that they didn’t bother. Agricultural societies often have no real concept of time within the day, other than morning, noon, evening, night. When the sun comes up, you get up and start working. When the sun is high in the sky you stop to eat, when it sets you have dinner and go to bed. They didn’t need to have any finer detail than that. If they need to meet someone, tomorrow morning was close enough. (Also this is probably why duels were scheduled at “high noon”, it appointed a fairly precise time without anyone needing to have a watch).

The same way we all do.

Day = sunrise to sunset
Night = sunset to sunrise

The Mayans have an elaborate religion, so it would surprise me if they did not divide the day according to what prayers and ceremonies had to be done during the day. But I have no real knowledge on it.

BTW, it’s Maya, not Mayans. I have friends who study the Maya, and they get really testy about this. Mayan only refers to language.

Breakfast (corn) lunch (corn) dinner (corn).

Not to be disrespectful. I know they had chocolatl too.

Oops, Sorry. Maya

@stump – Doesn’t bother me, just thought you’d like to know. But you should see how the archaeologists get up in arms about it. The only thing worse is telling them they dig up dinosaur bones, or comparing them to Indiana Jones.

I just read about Maya time and the Long Count, too, and noticed the same thing. I read they could pinpoint eclipses and that their Venus cycle erred by only two hours for periods covering 500 years. That to me implies they had a finer unit of time than the day…but then their calender was 365 days long and perhaps if they were keeping track of time with a finer unit, they would have known that 365 was a little shy of the actual cycle.

This site says the smallest unit of the Long Count was indeed the day. If they figured out there were roughly 365 days in the solar calendar, though, it would not have been much of a challenge to devise hours, minutes, or seconds. What a great question!

I don’t think the Wikipedia article you linked mentions the Great Cycle: 20 tuns = 1 katun; 20 katun = 1 baktun; 13 baktuns = 1 Great Cycle.. The first Great Cycle started on 8/11/3114 BC and ends on 12/23/2012 AD, which is why 2012 is significant. Src: Guate Lonely Planet guidebook.

So I talked to my Maya archaeologist friend who tells me she knows of nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that the Maya subdivided the day. Obviously there were no watches, but apparently no sundials have been found either (though there is always the chance that there have been, but she missed that bit of the literature – unlikely though). None of that of course can say that they definitely did or didn’t. They certainly had the sun’s movements figured out well enough that they could have devised a method, even if we haven’t found evidence of it. And of course, they might not have bothered to..

Morning coffee and newspaper, human sacrifice, light lunch, human sacrifice, cocktails dinner and cigars, sleep.

I should clarify that my archaeologist friend also said “I’m sure they did, but I know of no evidence of such.” So I disagree with her on the point. She’s usually so scientific and evidence based.

In Chichen Itza’s El Castillo pyramid, Kukulkan, climbs & descends the pyramid on the Solar Equinoxes. An Equinox is when the daylight and darkness time of a day is equal. It would appear that they did have a means that could measure time in a day. We just don’t understand or have not found their clocks, yet.