ABSTRACT
The past is intimately connected with time, a mysterious entity that we measure metaphorically in terms of space (a long or a short time). Early on, people developed calendars to help them keep track of past, present, and future time. Calendars are based on the motions of the natural world (sun, moon, stars, earth) and on a beginning of time (birth of a hero, founding of a religion or a nation, creation of the world, etc.). They contain both cyclic (hours, days, weeks, months, years) and linear (sequential years) elements. Cultures keep track of calendar time in many different systems. But calendars are a culturally defined measure of past time. The Mayans measured time in terms of days, years, and katuns (7,200 days, or about twenty years). Mayan time was both linear and cyclic, so that knowledge of recurrent patterns of events gave power and authority to the priests and wise men and women who understood the past. One historian of calendar time defines time as “interconnected hoops rolling up a great hill of progress.”3 Western time (like Chinese time) is linear. But for many different cultures, time was cyclic, a wheel and not an arrow, eternal recurrence and not linear progress.
