Oldest Mayan calendar found; goes way beyond 2012

[svenax]

There is no Mayan calender from which anyone could get end of the world information. It's just that their counting system, like any counting system, reaches a nice round number periodically (like ours does every century, millenium etc). In the case of the Mayan calender the first occurence of the the roundest number of them all occurs on December 21st 2012. There's nothing in any of the writings/inscriptions left by the Mayans that would lead any rational person to think that they expected this round number to coincide with the end of the world, that's pure speculation. This latest find confirms that they had no such expectation.

It isn't even a particularly round number we're coming to. According to the Mayan long count, time is divided into a number of multiplicative periods. At December 21 2012 we are coming to the end of 13th b'ak'tun. The end of the full cycle of 20 b'ak'tuns will come at October 13, 4772 when the calendar goes into the first pictun. And there are several periods after that stretching billions of years into the future.

 

[Orphia Nay]

There is no Mayan calender from which anyone could get end of the world information. It's just that their counting system, like any counting system, reaches a nice round number periodically (like ours does every century, millenium etc). In the case of the Mayan calender the first occurence of the the roundest number of them all occurs on December 21st 2012. There's nothing in any of the writings/inscriptions left by the Mayans that would lead any rational person to think that they expected this round number to coincide with the end of the world, that's pure speculation. This latest find confirms that they had no such expectation.

Thanks, Pixel42. Good answer.

 

[Pixel42]

It isn't even a particularly round number we're coming to. According to the Mayan long count, time is divided into a number of multiplicative periods. At December 21 2012 we are coming to the end of 13th b'ak'tun. The end of the full cycle of 20 b'ak'tuns will come at October 13, 4772 when the calendar goes into the first pictun. And there are several periods after that stretching billions of years into the future.

I thought I read somewhere that the Mayans believed the world/age before the present one lasted 13 b'ak'tuns, and this is why this particular round number is considered especially significant. But it sounds like you know more about it than I do.

 

[svenax]

I thought I read somewhere that the Mayans believed the world/age before the present one lasted 13 b'ak'tuns, and this is why this particular round number is considered especially significant. But it sounds like you know more about it than I do.

Well, there's supposedly one old writing which could possibly be interpreted in that way. But noone knows if it was something the Mayans generally believed, or even if anyone at all believed it. I don't know that much of it, but I had to read up a bit since a friend of mine is a firm Maya calendar end-of-the world believer.

 

[MG1962]

I thought I read somewhere that the Mayans believed the world/age before the present one lasted 13 b'ak'tuns, and this is why this particular round number is considered especially significant. But it sounds like you know more about it than I do.

No you are correct, svnax is just taking a much bigger overview of the calender. The simplest way to look at the 21st Dec is our dawning of the age of Aquarius or the start of the new millennium. In both instances the calender continues on.....we just see it as an opportunity to possibly change our outlook on things

 

[catsmate]

My corporate motto in 1999:

We're Y2K complacent

My corporate motto in 2012:

We're Mayan compliant

Now I gotta think up another one. Ideas?

~~ Paul

time_t ready.

 

[Soapy Sam]

"Counting photons practically since the Big Bang".

 

[AndrewBird]

Maya have this dance?

I'm still having an Apocalypta-party!

Every time I see someone on the street with a "end of the world date" board (thrice in 2010)… I always ask them on a date.

 

[H'ethetheth]

I just checked: Outlook says the world will end on August 29th 4500.

Oh, and I should add that Outlook has been uncannily accurate so far.

 

[Bloodtoes]

Should I even bother wearing my Mayan priest headdress to TAM then? Sigh..

 

[Bell]

There is no Mayan calender from which anyone could get end of the world information. It's just that their counting system, like any counting system, reaches a nice round number periodically (like ours does every century, millenium etc). In the case of the Mayan calender the first occurence of the the roundest number of them all occurs on December 21st 2012. There's nothing in any of the writings/inscriptions left by the Mayans that would lead any rational person to think that they expected this round number to coincide with the end of the world, that's pure speculation. This latest find confirms that they had no such expectation.

That's what annoys me so much. The Mayans didn't predict the end of the world... some stupid woo woos did

 

[Pacal]

So, I'm curious. Did the Mayans ever work out that whole 360 days and no leap year problem?

The Mayans generally dated events etc, by number of days not by years. It appears that they were well aware of the actual length of the year. (c. 365.25 days), but since they dated stuff by the number of days they didn't bother, because it was not necessary to think up somrthing like leap years when you date events like that.

 

[Pacal]

Oh and the total length of the Mayan calander is, (Drum Roll):

26,225,437,642,105,263,157,894,736,592,000 days or71,803,130,579,762,893,154,680,634,776 years long. For comparison the Universe is only14,500.000,000 years old. That is only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the full length of the Mayan calander.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

The Mayans generally dated events etc, by number of days not by years. It appears that they were well aware of the actual length of the year. (c. 365.25 days), but since they dated stuff by the number of days they didn't bother, because it was not necessary to think up somrthing like leap years when you date events like that.

Not really. If they were just counting days, then they wouldn't have a roll-over at 18 in the month column. Their digits worked all the way to 20. So if you just wanted to write something like 152399 days in base 20, that would be 19.19.19. But their dates never are written like that, they'd roll over at 18 in position 2, which is exactly what you'd expect if they're writing actually in years and months.

To put it otherwise, if they were counting days in base 20, 0.0.1.0.0 would be 400 days. It's not. It's 360 days. It's exactly that anomaly that actually says that position 3 is actually counting some 360 day years. You can convert that to number of days, of course, but that doesn't mean it's simply a base 20 number of days per se.

That said, it depends which age and calendar we're talking about. Some were more accurate, while some like the Tzolkin at 260 days, weren't even in the same ball-park as the tropical year. But none of them was actually aware of those .25 days at the end, AFAIK.

The closest that comes to it is the Ha'ab calendar, treating the year as exactly 365 days. And yes, it slowly rolls forward through seasons.

That said, yeah, it's complicated. Most Long Count dates are accompanied by the Calendar Round date as extra 4 digits. (I.e., the Ha'ab month and day, and the Tzolkin month and day.) Other dates are expressed as intervals forward or backward from some prophecised date.

 

[JohnG]

The subject is covered on this week's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, BTW.

Even if the Mayans really were predicting the end of the world, why would/should anyone take them seriously?

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

I'd like to know when the last "new cycle" began, for when the so called believers claim this will still be some kind of change.

I'm still waiting for the age of aquarius, when we all drop our weapons and love each other.

 

[Orphia Nay]

I'm still waiting for the age of aquarius, when we all drop our weapons and love each other.

 

[Bell]

The subject is covered on this week's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, BTW.

Even if the Mayans really were predicting the end of the world, why would/should anyone take them seriously?

They couldn't even predict their own collapse.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, someone can predict an eclipse or equinox and be unable to predict that they're about to get reamed by the Persians. See, Babylon.

So that the Mayans didn't have clairvoyance to see what the Europeans were about to do, doesn't really refute the idea that they had astronomical knowledge and could predict cosmic events. If that worked as a refutation, it would also refute every single astronomer ever, because they also didn't have clairvoyance.

And really, that's what some of those nutcases are getting at. They postulate that there's some cosmic alignment or some such that the Mayans predicted.

What DOES refute the idea that the Mayans had advanced astronomical knowledge and could predict cosmic events is... looking at what exactly did they know about the sky, and seeing that they actually knew very little. In fact, their knowledge is at most on par with what Egypt and Mesopotamia had circa 3000 BCE.

It took a long time for the Mesoamericans to even figure out that the EARTH's year is 365 days, not 360. (Or for that matter 360 days instead of 260 days.) That 365 day year on par right there with the earliest known Egyptian calendar, except the Mayans took a couple more thousands of years to get there.

They also never figured out the .25 days part of the year, nor how to resync the year to some event like a solstice or equinox. That's something that Mesopotamia had pretty much all along.

Hence basically even the most advanced calendar the Mayans ever had is still unable to predict even what frikken SEASON it will be in 400 years (a baktun), because by then their calendar will have drifted by 100 days. Predicting galactic scale alignments and whatnot, over thousands of years? Sorry, a civilization who can't even figure out the exact length of an Earth cycle, just doesn't have the level of knowledge for that.

Also, it's easy to see that the ONLY "star" they figured out how to track was Venus. You know, the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and Moon, and which everyone we know of was tracking for as long as we have a written history. As soon as the guys in Mesopotamia or Egypt know how to write at all, we see that they were tracking Venus and assigning all sorts of mystical meanings to it. As Inanna, it was the chief deity of Uruk, possibly as early as 4000 BCE, and people were counting days and whatnot about it.

So, you know, whop-de-do, astronomy-wise the Mayans were where the middle east was around 4000 BCE.

Also really the Mayans were strictly at the stage of counting days. And again, only for Venus.

Meanwhile in ancient Europe, and the ancient Middle East they not only expanded to tracking the other planets too, and came up with the epicycles theory and whatnot. The Greeks eventually even made mechanisms like the Antikythera mechanism to automatically calculate and show the positions of those planets. In fact they had even discovered, sorta, elliptic orbits, because their epicycles were eventually based on ellipses.

So, you know, the Greeks in 150 BCE or so COULD tell you at least when the planets in the solar system will align. In fact, they just needed to crank a mechanism for that. The Mayans in 1500 CE couldn't, because they had no model of positions of those planets, nor were they even counting the days for anything but Venus.

THAT is why I wouldn't trust them to predict any cosmic-scale stuff, not the fact that they didn't have clairvoiance to see that they're about to get reamed by the Europeans

 

[Rincewind]

I'm still waiting for the age of aquarius, when we all drop our weapons and love each other.

Oh no!

I've been waiting for the age of aquariums....