Concept
Long Count
A continuous Maya day count from a mythological epoch, 11 August 3114 BCE in the standard correlation. Its largest common unit, the baktun, is 144,000 days, about 394 years.
Unknown Maya scribe; photograph of a public-domain manuscript, “Dresden Codex, page 49”, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Thirteen baktuns are 1,872,000 days, about 5,125 years, and that interval completed on 21 December 2012. The count did not stop. Creation inscriptions write the epoch as 13.0.0.0.0; modern arithmetic often writes 0.0.0.0.0. The 13 is mythological, not a disagreement about length.