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counted with their fingers and their toes). The Long Count cycles are as follows:
     
    20 kins = 1 uinal = 20 days
18 uinals = 1 tun = 360 days
20 tuns = 1 katun =7200 days
20 katuns = 1 baktun = 144,000 days
    The Mayas multiplied the baktun by 13 to get what they termed a Great Cycle, equal to 5,130 years.
    At the same end of a great cycle, the Maya, Aztecs, and other Mesoamerican peoples believed all things would cease to exist and an entirely new world would be ushered in to start the next great cycle. The current great cycle probably began in 3114 BC and will end on 23 December 2012.
     

     
    Presumably the Maya discovered the true solar year using natural cues and careful astronomic observations, though exactly how they did it remains a puzzle. Until recently scholars believed their motivation was a literal worship of time, though new interpretations since the breaking of the Maya language code reveal that the Maya actually used their calendars to legitimize the acts of kings and other key events by recording with great accuracy the day, hour, and even minute when they occurred. This is shown in countless hieroglyphics, steles and paintings depicting the exact date when specific kings and queens waged battle, ceremonially mutilated themselves, married and performed important sacrifices.
    Maya and other Mesoamerican gods also seem to have demanded that their priests perform ceremonies precisely on time. Nowhere was this taken more seriously--and to such a bizarre extreme--than among the Aztecs. Obsessed with the belief that they must keep time on its proper course, the Aztecs offered a numbing progression of human sacrifices to appease their sun god, Tonatiuh, to assure that he would rise each day and cross the sky.
    The Aztecs believed that the sun required for ‘fuel’ rivers of blood from victims who ranged from priests and criminals to the deformed, though most were prisoners captured in warfare. If Spanish chroniclers can be believed, the Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 to 50,000 people a year in their capital, Tenochtitlan, with each month requiring a prescribed tally of victims: male and female, child and adult. For instance, in the months when the rains were supposed to come, children were drowned or walled up in caves. The more they wept and cried, the better the omen for rain. Others were flayed to help crops grow and burned to death during harvest time. To feed the need for such huge numbers of victims, the Aztecs arranged a peculiar agreement with their neighbours to fight regular ceremonial battles not for conquest, but to allow each side to capture large quantities of sacrificial victims. Apparently most of the victims seized in what was called the War of Flowers considered sacrifice an honour or an unquestionable act of fate. Most were anaesthetized first with narcotic plants, though all were left conscious enough to scream and exhibit pain, which was part of this bloodiest of time rituals.
     
    Despite the remarkable achievements in time reckoning by Mesoamericans and the people of Wessex, out of all those who early embraced the sun, it is the Egyptians who lie in the direct path of our story. It is their affair with Sol which brought us our calendar, making the solar year victorious over the moon first along the Nile and then in Europe and, much later, around the world. But this triumph of the Egyptian year was hardly inevitable. Nor was it even likely given the circumstances that led to the fusing of the ancient solar calendar of the Nile with a brash, upstart empire ruled by a people living on another river, the Tiber, and led by a conqueror whose adoption of a new calendar had more to do with his love for a legendary woman than with a passion for accurately measuring time.
     
     

3 Caesar Embraces Time
     
    Caesar . . . reorganized the Calendar which the College of Priests had allowed to fall into such disorder, by inserting days or months as it suited them, that the harvest and vintage festivals no