MAYAN CALENDAR
DOESN’T END?
Hello
Doves!!
You most likely saw
this article today, but just in case you did not get a
chance to read it, I have copied it here.
Rather mind
blowing!!! And the timing is incredible!!
Nevermind
the Apocalypse: Earliest Mayan Calendar Found
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." [End of the World? Top
Doomsday Fears]
A
brilliant surprise
The newly discovered calendar is
complex indeed, featuring stacked bars and dots
representing fives and ones and recording lunar cycles in
six-month chunks of time. But it wasn't these mathematical
notations that first caught the archeologists' eye.
William Saturno, an archaeologist from Boston University,
was mapping the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast
Guatemala in 2010 when one of his undergraduate students
peered into an old trench dug by looters and reported
seeing traces of ancient paint.
The discovery was "certainly
nothing to write home about," Saturno told reporters on
Thursday (May 10), in advance of releasing details of the
murals in this
week's issue of the journal Science. Paint doesn't
preserve well in the rain forest climate of Guatemala, and
Saturno figured that the faint red and black lines his
student had found weren't going to yield much information.
But he felt he had a responsibility to excavate the room
the looters had tried to reach, if only to be able to
report the size of the structure along with the paint
finding.
As Saturno continued along the
old trench to the back wall, he was shocked to run into a
brilliantly painted portrait: a Mayan king, sitting on his
throne, wearing a red crown with blue feathers flowing out
behind him. Another figure peeks out from behind him. On
an adjoining wall, three loincloth-clad figures sit,
wearing feathered headdresses. One is captioned "Older
Brother Obsidian," or "Senior Obsidian," a
still-mysterious title. Next to the king, a man painted in
brilliant orange wearing jade bracelets reaches out with a
stylus, likely identifying him as a scribe. He is labeled
as "Younger Brother Obsidian," or perhaps "Junior
Obsidian." [See Photos of the Mayan
murals]
It's
not the end of the world
These paintings — covering the
west and north walls of the small, 6-foot-by-6-foot room —
weren't the only surprise Xultun had to offer. On the east
wall, someone had painted a series of small, complex
hieroglyphics. This, the researchers soon realized, was a
calendar.
The calendar seemed to have been
added after the murals were completed, as some of the
numbers cover up painted figures on the wall. It's almost
as if an ancient scribe got sick of flipping through a
document to find his timekeeping chart and decided to put
it on the wall for at-a-glance reference, Stuart said.
"It's kind of like having a
whiteboard in your office where you're writing down
formulas that you want to remember," he said.
The Maya recorded time in a
series of cycles, including 400-year chunks called
baktuns. It's these baktuns that have led to rumors of an
end-of-the-world catastrophe on Dec. 21, 2012
— on that date, a cycle of 13 baktuns will be complete.
But the idea that this means the end of the world
is a misconception, Stuart said. In fact, Maya experts
have known for a long time that the calendar doesn't end
after the 13th baktun. It simply begins a new cycle. And
the calendar encompasses much larger units than the
baktun.
"There were 24 units of time they
actually could have incorporated into their calendar,"
Stuart said. "Here, we're only seeing five units and
they're still really big."
In one column, the ancient scribe
even worked out a cycle of time recording 17 baktuns, the
researchers found. In another spot, someone etched a "ring
number" into the wall. These notations were used to record
time in a previous cycle, thousands of years into the
past. The calendar also appears to note the cycles of Mars
and Venus, the researchers said. Symbols of gods
head the top of each lunar cycle, suggesting that each
cycle had its own patron deity.
"There was a lot more to the Maya
calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart said.
Scratching
the
surface
This ancient "wall calendar" is a
major find, because the first known calendar and
astronomical tables before this time came from the Dresden
Codex, a book that dates to the 11th or 12th centuries.
Most likely, Saturno said, the wall calendar and the
Dresden Codex both arose from earlier books that long ago
rotted away. [8 Grisly Archaeological
Discoveries]
The mural room gives an
unprecedented glimpse into the work lives of Mayan
scientists, Stuart said. The mural room is
in a compound with several other rooms, which were
collapsed and built over in later years. The murals only
survived, because, instead of collapsing the room, Mayan
engineers filled it with rubble and then built on top of
it.
"This is clearly a space where
someone important was living, this important household of
the noble class, and here you also have a mathematician
working in that space," Stuart said. "It's a great
illustration of how closely those roles were connected in
Mayan society."
Kings would have been extremely
interested in timekeeping, Stuart said, because part of
their job was to conduct rituals of renewal at certain
times. Unfortunately, the name of the king pictured in the
mural room has been lost.
Although Xultun was first
discovered in 1915, less than 0.1 percent has been
explored, Saturno said. Looters damaged much of the
ancient city in the 1970s, meaning much of historical
significance has been lost. But archaeologists still don't
even know how far the boundaries of the town extend.
"[That] investigations can begin
and in a house like this we can find something we've never
seen before only speaks to the great wealth of scientific
material that remains in Guatemala in the Maya area for us
to discover," Saturno said.
The excavations of the mural room
were funded by the National Geographic Society.
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That all being said, it
still means that Dec.21st is still the END OF
AN AGE…AND THE AGE OF PISCES, AND THE END OF THE CHURCH
AGE!! Interesting discovery at the last minute on the
clock!!
I say we keep looking up!! Amen?
Patti
C.