The Mayans and their calendars

The Mayans were masters at ...

... creating intricate stone icons Like this huge stone mask at the Kohunlich ruins; Mayan monuments celebrated gods, rulers, spiritual events ... building precisely engineered, monolithic temples Such as the 98 ft. tall (30 m) temple to the god Kukulkan, also known as the El Castillo pyramid

The Mayans developed many calendar systems to fit a variety of purposes, but scholars insist their famous Long Count Calendar was not designed to predict the worlds end, despite what people hyping an apocalypse on Dec. 21 would tell us. ... carving complex scenes in stucco and stone Such as this image of Upakal Kinich Janaab Pakal, ruler of the the Mayan city of Palenque, around 742 A.D.

The Mayans created many types of alendars

Name Tzolkin Haab Round Length in days 260 365 18,980 How it may have originated A means to track length of a human pregnancy, or a tally of days between zenith passage of the sun at the latitude where early Olmec civilization concentrated Mayan version of a calendar tracking one solar year Tzolkin and Haab used in combination, meant to track a common lifespan in Mayan times (52 years) Carving found at a Mayan site called Quirigua, in present-day Guatemala, on a stone artifact called Stela C; it denotes the Mayans mythical creation date: 13 baktun, 0 katun, 0 tun, 0 uinal, 0 kin, which is equivalent to Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. on our calendar

Doomsday theories, Long Count calendar

Long Count is based on cycles of numbers 13, 20; dates back 5,126 years, covering all Mayan history The current Long Count cycle ends on Dec. 21, 2012 A.D., 5,126 years after the creation date Doomsday theorists have seized upon this

Recently unearthed mural proves Mayans expected time to reset

In 2011, a small room was found at the ruins of Xultun, in Guatemala, dating to the early 9th century Its walls and ceiling are painted with human figures and two are covered with incised hieroglyphs, many of them of a timekeeping nature

Venus Moon Mars

The Xultun hieroglyphs contain observations of orbital cycles of the Moon and possibly also Mars and Venus, organized in a way indicating the Mayans were tracking celestial events as far as 7,000 years in the future, well beyond Dec. 21, 2012
2012 MCT

But the Mayans were NOT into predicting global destruction

Scholars fiercely agree the Long Count does not predict doomsday They say it reflects Mayan belief in a spiritual rebirth at the end of the 13th Baktun They insist the count is meant to reset, just as our own does after each Dec. 31 Writes Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, Australian scientist and commentator

In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1 or good-ol 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas.
Source: Universe Today, Maya Exploration Center, Great Moments in Science, National Geographic

Graphic: Robert Dorrell