Maya Clock
Dots, bars and a shell
How to read it
Point at a step, or tap it, to light up that part of the clock.
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Left column: the hour (0–23). Right column: the minutes.
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A dot is 1, a bar is 5, the shell is 0.
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Levels stack: bottom is units, top is twenties.
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Example: one dot above three dots = 1×20+3 = 23.
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The story
The Maya wrote numbers with dots (1), bars (5) and a shell for zero — one of history's first true zeroes — in a base-20 system. Here hours and minutes are stacked Maya numerals.
- Year
- 1st century BCE
- Place
- Mesoamerica
- Creator
- Mesoamerican peoples (Maya)
Fun fact
The Maya were using zero centuries before it reached Europe.
