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So many cultures, ancient cultures that is, have put significance on this date
Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
So many cultures, ancient cultures that is, have put significance on this date
no
1 did, and we are wrong. The Mayan year was not 365 days. Their colander ends in 2085....and they don't say it ends, it resets.
edit on 2-12-2012 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
So many cultures, ancient cultures that is, have put significance on this date
no
1 did, and we are wrong. The Mayan year was not 365 days. Their colander ends in 2085....and they don't say it ends, it resets.
edit on 2-12-2012 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
So many cultures, ancient cultures that is, have put significance on this date
no
1 did, and we are wrong. The Mayan year was not 365 days. Their colander ends in 2085....and they don't say it ends, it resets.
edit on 2-12-2012 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)
www.history.com...
Debunking the 2012 Myth
In recent years, popular culture has latched on to theories that the Maya predicted an apocalypse on December 21, 2012. That date corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar’s current cycle, which lasts for 13 of the 144,000-day intervals known as baktuns.
But scholars have long argued that, while Mayan astronomers saw each cycle’s conclusion as significant, they never foresaw an apocalypse. According to the researchers who studied the Xultún house, the calculations on the walls confirm once again that the Mayan calendar stretches far beyond this December. One notation in particular records an interval of 17 baktuns, a period of time that extends past the alleged doomsday.
“This sort of popular culture conception of the Maya calendar having an expiration date on it is in and of itself a fallacy,” Saturno said. He compared the system to odometers that reset to zero after 99,000 miles because they can’t display more than five digits. “If we’re driving a car, we don’t anticipate that at 100,000 miles the car will vanish from beneath us,” he said. Stuart said that, rather than covering a finite period of time, “the Maya calendar is going to keep going and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future.”
Saturno acknowledged that the new discovery might not sway people with absolute confidence in the December 2012 prediction. “I think that as a general rule, if someone is a hardcore believer that the world is going to end in 2012, no painting is going to convince them otherwise,” he said. What may do the trick, however, is waking up on December 22, he added.
www.livescience.com...
The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.
The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.
"The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around."
www.mayacalendar.org...
The Truth Around Mayan Myths
The following is to help straighten out erroneous Mayan Myths.
The Mayan Calendar Continues Long after 2012.
The Mayan Calendar begins a new cycle in the year 2012 much as the Gregorian Calendar begins a new cycle on January 1st every year. There are some very interesting astronomical events happening in 2012 and some believe these events are what the ancient Maya were targeting, anchoring. There are even references to dates beyond 2012, carved in stone, left by the Maya of centuries past.
There are possibly 17 or more different Mayan Calendric Systems
I have seen reference to as many as 17 different Mayan Calendric Systems multiple times:
Sacred: T'zolkin
Count of Days: Ch'oltun (aka: Long Count)
Civil: Haab
Solar: Ab'
Vigesimal: Cholmay
digitaljournal.com...
Apparently the calendar projects some 7,000 years into the future, which gives us all a little more time. Experts say that the discovery means that December 21, 2012 simply marks the beginning of a new calendar cycle and not an apocalypse as has been thought up until now.
Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
reply to post by Dustytoad
yet you have NO idea of how the Mayan calendars work...
The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.
The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.
"The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around."
This date has NO significance, even though it does NOT end in 2012, they just start again. It works like an odometer. Not a countdown timer.
The scrawled numbers confirm what experts have been proclaiming for years: the Mayan calendar does not predict that the world will end on December 21, 2012.
www.huffingtonpost.com...
The mural also showcases the unique Maya Calendar, which was wholly distinct from the calendar used by the Mexica. As with the Mexica, Maya dates combine at least two calendars—one covering 365 days and the other 260 days, such that every day had two names, which reset every 52 years.
But unlike the Mexica, it also uses a "long count" system that adds a numeral at the end of a cycle to keep a constant count of years, more like the Christian calendar. "Let's say something happened in '76. Is that 1976 or 1776?" says Karl Taube, an iconographer at the University of California, Riverside. "Unless you have a constant chronology, we don't really know. But with the Maya long count, we know exactly."
This "long count" feature is how we are able to extend the Maya calendar all the way to 2012. The Mexica calendar, by contrast, simply reset at zero at the end of a cycle. The Mexica would have no way of conceiving such a specific date so far into the future.
Yet it is the Mexica, not the Maya, who trafficked in the apocalypse. The Classic Maya had almost no tradition of cataclysmic endings (though they may have picked it up centuries later from groups like perhaps the Mexica). For them, 2012 is just a year when several of their calendars reset, like 2000 for modern calendars. Taube, who is helping interpret the paintings around Xultun, says the 2012 hysteria totally misses the point.
It's not that Maya were tracking the apocalypse but that they saw significance in every new day. With multiple calendars, ancient Mesoamericans had a different combination of dates for every day, each combination having a special significance. Almost as if every day was a holiday.
news.discovery.com...
According to all the ridiculous hype surrounding Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayans "predicted" the end of the world with one of their calendars. On this date, doomsayers assert that Earth will be ravaged by a smorgasbord of cataclysmic astronomical events -- everything from a Planet X flyby to a "killer" solar flare to a geomagnetic reversal, ensuring we have a very, very bad day. As we all know by now, these theories of doom are bunkum.
And now, according to a recent study by an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, this fundamental "end date" may also be inaccurate. It could be at least 60 days out of whack.
Correlating Calendars
A huge issue when studying ancient calendars comes when trying to correlate their time frames with our modern (Gregorian) calendar. After all, for archaeologists to work out when a big event is documented in the Mayan calendar (such as a war, famine or religious celebration), it needs to be translated into "our" years, months and days.
As the Gregorian calendar began 2010 years ago, we have a standard time line for over two millennia of historical events. But to understand the events documented by the fallen culture, Mayan scholars needed to find significant events common in both the Gregorian and Long Count calendars so they can "correlate."
To do this, most Mayan scholars use a well-respected correlation factor called the "GMT constant." GMT stands for the initials of the last names of the archaeologists who calculated the constant: Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez and J. Eric S. Thompson.
But Gerardo Aldana of UC Santa Barbara is now questioning the validity of this correlation factor due to a possible misidentification of ancient astronomical events in a new book called "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World."
The Maya were highly skilled astronomers who kept meticulous records of the night sky. They documented the phases of the moon, recorded eclipses and even tracked the movement of Venus. In fact, the Venus cycle was an important calendar for the Maya. Their records enabled them to predict future astronomical cycles with great accuracy.
So how do they correlate dates when they are not sure of the references we can track? There are more reasons on that site as to why 2012 is off...
Venus or a Meteor?
Although GMT uses several sources of astronomical, archaeological and historical evidence to correlate the Long Count with our modern calendar, Aldana has cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the astronomical evidence interpreted from ancient Mayan artifacts and colonial texts.
One of the key events described by Aldana is a battle date as set by the ruler of Dos Pilas (a Maya site in the current geographical location of Guatemala). Ruler Balaj Chan K’awiil chose this date by the appearance of Chak Ek'. According to Johan Normark, researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University, Chak Ek' "used to be believed to be Venus but in another study Aldana believes it is a [meteor]."