The Mayans were an amazing  people who lived in Mesoamerica, South America around 1500 years ago. The height of their civilization appears to have been 250 - 900 CE ( A. D. ) They appear to have had a few main cities :- Copan in Honduras, Tikal in Guatemala and Chiapas in Mexico.
     They had beautiful temples, elaborate hieroglyphic writing, exquisite jewellery, highly advanced sculptures and pottery, and some very sophisticated works of art made from copper and gold.
The interest in the Maya is almost as great as the interest in ancient Egypt. These people were privy to some amazing knowledge about the planets and the solar system.

     There are only two ways that the Maya could have this knowledge.

1. They have observed and collected information on the heavens over centuries, the same as we have today, with modern devices like telescopes, space probes and advances mathematics and astronomy.
2. Someone has taught them

     Some of the facts we now know they possessed are as follows.

1. Venus' movement around the Sun takes 584 days
2. 149 Lunar cycles takes 4,400 days
3. An earth year was calculated to very accurate 365.2420

THE LONG COUNT
The Mayans believed that the start of time  ( year zero ) was 3113 B. C. 12th August.
     This must have been a significant date, something must have happened, or allegedly happened, even if it was long before their civilization started. But the spooky fact is the closeness of the Egyptian year one of the age of Horus, about 3141 B.C. ( only about 28 years! )This is an uncannily similar scenario for a calendar as our modern Gregorian Calendar, with it's B.C. and A.D. zones.

THE SOLAR CALENDAR
This system is quite close to our current calendar system. It has 365 day years, with twelve months of thirty days, and a thirteenth month of 5 days. They were also fully aware of adjusting for leap years, like we do.

THE SACRED CALENDAR
We don't know what this calendar was used for. It has a 260 day year. It has 5 months of 52 days. The start coincides with the solar calendar every 52 years. They were fully aware of this interlocking cycle, and it was important to them.

The Mayans were ahead with their counting system. They used Zero. And Base 20, so that a 1 in the units, or multiplier column could be  1, 20, 400,  160,000, etc . . .
Instead of million and billion, they had a special symbol for 23,040,000,000 called  alau-tun

     The only reason that can be explained for their interest in such accurate large numbers, is counting long periods of time. However this is chiefly because the experts remain baffled as to any other reason for such large numbers.

     When the  alau-tun  multiplier is applied to the mayan long count it represents a period of over 63 million years.