As many other human groups trough out history, the Mayas evolved from a nomad group into a complete civilization that comprehended the construction of buildings, an agricultural organization, domestication of animals, and commerce in it's many forms. For many of these activities it became quite necessary to develop some sort of numeric system that would allow them to regulate their trades and measurements. This system later became the corner stone of their calendar system and their astronomy studies.

Unlike most ancient numeric system that depended on the use of many different symbols, the Mayas only used three (the dot, the bar, and the zero), yet they used a very clever system of positions that allowed them to use all the normal mathematic operations. The use of this operations was way ahead of it's time, even the Hindus who transmitted their knowledge to the Arabs, and the Arabs to the Europeans, didn't discover them until at least 600 years later.

In this brief recompilation we intend to explain the basics of the Maya numeric system that will allow you to read and write any Maya number. As you will see the system is very similar in many ways to the numeric system you already know so this wont be as difficult as it sounds.

Trough out this tutorial, you will se a box on your right side that you can use to type any number and it will be converted to Maya numeric symbols.

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Introduction|The basic symbols|Positional system