Yeah, About That Whole “Mayan Doomsday Calendar” Thing …
I think we might need to push the conspiracy theory back a few years, thanks to the discovery of a Guatemalan inscription that represents the oldest Mayan calendar found to date. How many years are the Doomsdayers off? Oh, maybe 7,000?
The ring number (a Mayan method of calculating astronomical dates, which is stunningly complex) and the lunar charts shown in the black-and-white paintings shown above point to dates almost seven millennia in the future from their A.D. 800 origin. They are accompanied by images of mayan scribes and subjects, as shown below.
That puts any Mayan future predictions a bit beyond December 2012. But we already knew that was BS, right? Yet some still need convincing. University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart had this to say about the Mayan calendar, whose repeating nature is misconstrued as predicting an apocalypse:
“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future. Numbers we can’t even wrap our heads around.”
The Mayans kept these accurate calendars in order to coordinate religious festivals and royal events, especially to appeal to their gods for things like harvests and weather. In fact, at the time the Guatemalan paintings were made, they were locked in a deadly drought, and were perhaps charting dates for future appeals to a higher power.
Whatever the case, the idea that Mayans were concerned about the end of the world is total bunk. They were more concerned about the end of their civilization, as are many today. Says expedition leader William Saturno:
“We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”
(↬ National Geographic, photos ©Tyrone Turner and National Geographic)