"First Dates: The Maya calendar and writing system were not the only ones in Mesoamerica--or even the earliest" by Joyce Marcus in "Natural History" (April 1991, pp. 22-25) At the time of the Spanish conquest, a number of peoples-- the Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Zoque, Maya, and others--occupied the region extending from central Mexico to as far east as Honduras and El Salvador. Although they spoke diverse languages and had distinct customs, they all shared what anthropologists consider a similar, Mesoamerican culture. While the Maya constructed monumental cities in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, some of their best-known accomplishments had their origins among earlier societies located to the west of their homeland. Among these are the related phenomena of hieroglyphic writing and calendrical systems. In Mesoamerica, writing first emerged among chiefdoms, societies that had hereditary differences in rank--based on the degree of kinship to the chief--but that lacked the division into exclusive upper and lower classes typical of ancient states, or civilizations. Between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago, a network of chiefdoms ran from the Valley of Mexico south through the present states of Morelos, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas to the Pacific coast of Guatemala and El Salvador. The Maya who occupied the southern lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula may have been relatively late participants in this network. A wide range of materials and artifacts--including magnetite, jade, marine shells, obsidian, and pottery--circulated among the chiefdoms, probably as a result of trading and the ritual exchange of gifts on the part of high-ranking families. This interaction fostered a social milieu in which ideas traveled rapidly. For example, among the widely distributed items were pottery vessels with stylized motifs, such as lightning, that appear to have been linked to descent groups. The exchange of objects also reinforced political connections between chiefs, who formed alliances through intermarriage and cooperated in raiding rival chiefdoms. A chief's authority was sanctioned by his supposed links to supernatural forces, rather than backed by real political power based on laws and arms. Nevertheless, a great deal of labor was coordinated for communal efforts, notably in constructing the massive pyramidal bases for temples. In Mesoamerica, the first carved stone monuments with hieroglyphs appeared in this context. They were erected, not in the Maya region, but in Oaxaca (inhabited by Zapotec-speaking people) and in southern Veracruz and western Chiapas (inhabited by Zoque-speaking people). Incidentally, the ancient Olmec of Veracruz and Tabasco, famed for their jade carvings and colossal basalt human heads--and once regarded as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica--were already in their decline by the time writing came to the fore. Some of the early hieroglyphic monuments made use of a 260- day calendar, which was common to all Mesoamerican groups and probably originated long before it was first recorded in stone. This calendar was produced by combining twenty day names with the numbers 1 through 13. A counting system based on twenty (perhaps originally derived from the twenty digits of the hands and feet) was used by all Mesoamerican Indians, while the day names, based on animals and natural phenomena, varied somewhat from group to group. Thirteen, far from being unlucky, was an auspicious and sacred number. The combination of a given number and day name formed a unit that could not recur until 260 days (20 X 13) had elapsed. The calendar as a whole served ritual purposes, such as scheduling events for favorable days or divining the destiny of a child born on a certain day. So important was this 260-day calendar that among peoples such as the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Aztec, children were often named for the day of their birth, resulting in such names as 2 Wind, 3 Crocodile, 5 Flower, 6 Monkey, and 8 Deer. To give the day name, a hieroglyphic sign was used; to give the number, most groups (including the Zapotec and Maya) used a dot for the number and a bar for the number 5. Thus, "8 Deer" would be written with one bar, three dots, and a picture of a deer's head. Among the Maya, the number was placed to the left or above the day name. Because calendrical glyphs were so common in Mesoamerican inscriptions--and were the first signs deciphered--scholars such as Sylvanus G. Morley and J. Eric S. Thompson once assumed that many pre-Columbian monuments recorded only calendrical information and that the Maya "worshiped time." But the Zapotec, Maya, Aztec, and others used the calendar to place both real and mythical events in time. Very early on, Mesoamerican chiefdoms depicted members of the elite and captives taken in combat, inserting the calendrical names of the persons portrayed. Subsequent Mesoamerican writing systems continued to record the taking of rival lords and other captives and to honor victors in battle. In later states, which were larger and more socially stratified than chiefdoms, the themes of territorial control and personal aggrandizement were added. With the emergence of a distinct noble class, writing became a tool of the state. It content then expanded to include royal genealogies, ancestor worship, and important events in the rulers' lives, such as birth, marriage, and accession to the throne. The earliest-known stone carving to display elements of the 260-day calendar is Monument 3 from San Jose Mogote, located in the Valley of Oaxaca only nine miles north of the ruins of the ancient Zapotec city of Monte Alban. This carved stone is between 2,600 and 2,500 years old (its age can be estimated because it lies beneath a dated floor and is associated with a certain type of pottery). It shows what appears to be a naked sacrificial victim sprawled in an awkward position, eyes closed, mouth open, with a stream of blood flowing from his open chest following removal of his heart. (These pictorial conventions appeared at a later date in Maya monuments.) Between the feet of the figure is inscribed the Zapotec day sign for "earthquake," placed above an ornate dot. This inscription, 1 Earthquake, was probably the victim's calendrical name. As a result of competition for land, tribute, and water, rival settlements engaged in raiding, and prisoners so taken were commonly sacrificed to insure supernatural favors. This may have been the fate of 1 Earthquake. His name was proclaimed for all to appreciate, perhaps simply because he was a chief or other important person, perhaps also to identify the town that had been raided. This custom prevailed in later times among the Maya and other groups, but whether the victims were members of the same ethnic group as the captors or belonged to a different one is rarely easy to determine. Monument 3 was laid flat on a bed of slabs at the entrance to a forty-foot-long corridor between two large public buildings, where anyone passing through would tread on the carved representation of the sacrificed captive. The image of a conqueror stepping on the body of a captive was another convention later borrowed by the Maya, who carved stone prisoner galleries and impressive monumental displays of political propaganda. The Maya depicted prisoners as the pedestals on which rulers stood; they also carved the risers and treads of stone staircases with images of bound prisoners lying full-length, which the ruler would ascend on the way to a palace or temple. Perhaps a century after Monument 3 was carved, one of the earliest public buildings in the Zapotec city of Monte Alban was completed. It featured a gallery of more than 300 carved representations of naked captives. At this time, the first pure texts appeared, containing both calendrical and noncalendrical glyphs without any pictorial scenes. Significantly, some inscriptions, such as that on Stela 15 at Monte Alban, include calendrical signs (recognizable by their style and format) with numbers between 14 and 18. The great Mexican scholar Alfonso Caso interpreted these sings as the first evidence of a Mesoamerican 365-day calendar. Such a calendar, well-known from later sites, was divided into eighteen "months" of twenty days and a final interval of five days. Caso argued that the calendar signs with numbers greater than 13 must have been month signs (many later examples follow this method of naming the months). These early Zapotec monuments suggest that the 260-day calendar may have been the first used in Mesoamerica, and that the 260-day and 365-day calendars were used side by side at least 2,400 years ago. Subsequently, the two sequences were used in interlocking combination to produce a cycle of dates that did not repeat for fifty-two years. This system set the stage for a still more comprehensive method of reckoning time, the so-called Long Count calendar. This calendar, for which the later Maya are famous, first appeared in a series of monuments in a region some linguists have assigned to Zoque-speaking Indians. Somewhere in southern Mexico prior to 36 B.C., people had begun to use multiples of a 360-day "year" to produce a very accurate calendar for measuring long intervals of time. The Maya version of that calendar used as its starting point a date corresponding to August 13, 3114 B.C., of the Western (Gregorian) calendar. Some scholars have speculated that this base date was of mythological significance, calculated to coincide with the creation of the present world. From that starting point, the Indians tabulated the elapsed time in order to place events in an unambiguous temporal context. Long Count dates were recorded with a string of numbers whose value depended on their position in the string (as in the Western system of ones, tens, hundreds, and so on). This efficient notation included a "completion" symbol to be used, when needed, as a place holder (accordingly, the Indians of southern Mexico are credited with independently inventing the concept of zero). Using this position-value notation (top to bottom or left to right in the case of Maya monuments), five different orders of time were recorded, in descending size. They began with the largest unit, a cycle of four hundred 360-day years (144,000 days). The next unit consisted of twenty 360-day years (7,200 days). The third unit was the eighteen-month year (360 days). Then came a month of 20 days, followed by the smallest unit, the individual day. Stone monuments erected at four different sites--Chiapa de Corzo, Tres Zapotes, El Baul, and Abaj Takalik--display dates that fall into the period that archeologists call Cycle 7. These are dates that lead off with seven of the 400-year units. Together, the four dates span 52 years, from 36 B.C. to A.D. 16. For example, Stela C from Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, records the Long Count of 7.16.6.16.18, using dots as 1 and bars as 5. In other words, the date is expressed as 7 cycles of 144,000 days, 16 units of 7,200 days, 6 years of 360 days, 16 months of 20 days, and 18 additional days. If we assume that the starting date was August 13, 3114 B.C. (as it was for Maya), this corresponds to September 3, 32 B.C., in the Western calendar. We do not know what important event was commemorated by the carving, since the rest of the text is heavily eroded. None of these early sites lies within the area generally assigned to the Classic Maya. One falls in western Chiapas, one in southern Veracruz, and two on the Pacific coast piedmont of Guatemala. The first securely dated monument known from the Maya lowlands--the area where Maya civilization reached its peak--falls in Cycle 8. This monument is Stela 29 from Tikal, in the tropical rain forest of northern Guatemala. Its Long Count date of 8.12.14.8.15 corresponds to July 6, 292, in the Western calendar. Another important date from about this time is found on a jade artifact called the Leyden Plaque, believed to have been carved at Tikal even though it was found more than 120 miles away. its front depicts a noble, probably an early Tikal ruler, with a captive sprawled at his feet. On the back of the plaque is a Long Count date of 8.14.3.1.12, which corresponds to September 5, 320. What makes the Leyden Plaque so important is that it includes a verb that means "was seated" (in office), followed by the name of a ruler, his titles, and an "emblem glyph," representing the city or possibly the royal dynasty of Tikal. The plaque thus commemorated the day on which this ruler took office. Although the Maya knew of and used the 260-day calendar, they apparently did not draw their names from it, as did their neighbors to the west and north. Most Maya rulers had names composed of other signs, including pictograms (such as animal heads, skulls, limbs, tails, weapons, or shields), ideograms (arbitrary conventions for such things as sky, earth, sun, or darkness), and phonograms, which transcribed their names phonetically. In the case of the Leyden Plaque, the Maya ruler's name features a bird's head with signs appended to the left and above that serve as modifiers. Although the Maya were not the first Mesoamericans to use writing and calendars, through their contributions, hieroglyphic writing assumed its maximum versatility, complexity, and correspondence to a spoken language. We have yet to determine whether Mesoamerican writing had multiple origins or a single origin followed by rapid regional diversification. There are many more early texts out there still to be discovered. The long- neglected Zoque region of southern Veracruz and western Chiapas, which lies between the better-known Olmec, Zapotec, and Maya homelands, might provide the missing transitional stages between the earliest inscriptions and those of the Maya.