I've addressed this countless times before, but the basic gist of it is: it's millennialism done
wrong. I mean fearing the millennium because it ends in 000 is stupid as it is, doing it for someone else's calendar is stupider, and doing it only because of being too stupid to even understand
it's not actually a millennium at all... pretty much takes the cake.
So, to start at the beginning, the Mayans had a numbering in base 20. So while we have digits from 0 to 9 before adding an extra digit, the Mayans actually had 20 digits. The basic story is that they counted on fingers and toes, whereas our ancestors counted only on fingers. (And as i always say, thank goodness the Mayans didn't make a male-only math that goes to 21
)
So 20 was a pretty important number for them,
So was the number 13. This will actually be important when we get to why this isn't a millennium.
Their first attempt at a calendar was the Tzolkin, which actually has 260 days per year, as 13 months of 20 days each. So, 13x20, geddit? It also was the interval between two rises of the sun between two stones in one point, and the approximate duration of a human gestation, counting from the first missed period (whereas we count from the last period.) Coincidence? They obviously thought not.
You'd think a 260 day year would be obviously stupid, but it was actually in use for a loong time.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which is actually the one used in the 2012 prophecy. It still was a piss-poor calendar, but slightly less so than Tzolkin.
The Long Count calendar ditched the 13 entirely and went for 18 months of 20 days each, so 360 days total. Which still skips through the actual calendar like crazy. By comparison, the Egyptians had figured a 365 day calendar, oh, only a couple of millennia before them.
From there it went sorta like for us with decades, centuries and millennia, except counting 20s instead of 10s. So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a "katun" was 20 Long Count years. For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a "baktun" was 20x20 Long Count years. For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a "piktun" was, you guessed, 20x20x20 Long Count years.
Which brings us to 2012, when the 13'th baktun ends.
It also bears mentioning that not only there are no Mayan end-of-world prophecies for that date. And in fact there are inscribed dates on their monuments going trillions of years into the future. I dunno what was supposed to happen trillion years into the future, and why it was important to write it down, but it would be silly to worry about it if the world ends in 2012, innit?
The whole scare peddled there is really just base-20 millennialism.
And there we have the first problem. What ends in 2012 is simply the 13'th baktun (century) of the Long Count calendar. The actual piktun (millennium) doesn't end for another couple thousand years. So even for a millennium scare, it's a millennium scare done stupidly wrong.
Some folks postulated that, basically, because 13 was such a lucky number for Mayans, surely the hundreds go only up to 13. But that's not actually supported for anything, and nothing else in the Long Count calendar is using thirteens anyway. There's a max 18 in the months position, but the years and decades positions use all the 20 digits, so it's not clear at all why the centuries position would stop at 13. So, just to spell it out lout, its not being supported by anything means
the 2012 scare peddlers made it up, to sound like there was a millennium rollover where there is none.
In our digits, it's like being scared of the calendar rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, at east going from 999 to 1000 sounds, you know, oooh, millennium, running out of digits. But 699 to 700? It's not like you run out of digits at 6. (Or in the Mayans' case at 13.)
But anyway, that's what is going to end and what is going to start. The 13'th baktun (Mayan base-20 century) ends, the 14'th baktun starts. Sounds like a good reason to party, if anyone asks me, but that's about the whole importance of it.
It also doesn't help that all the brouhaha about foretold galactic alignments and other such BS is missing the following important aspects:
1. It's based on a caledar with 360 day years. Really, it's from a culture who was too primitive to even figure out the length of the year. Would
you trust them to tell you anything about galactic scale events?
2. The only astronomical feat those guys ever did was counting the days in the cycles of Venus. Which is, you know, only the most visible star in the sky. And even then, just counting the length of its cycle, not any fancy solar system model or anything. They had no flipping clue even about the other planets in our own solar system, much less about galactic-scale stuff.
For the record, the Mayans then figured out the Haab calendar, which finally padded the year to 365 days. It was the old 18x20 Long Count year, plus 5 unnamed days at the end. Finally putting them on par with the Egyptian 365 day calendar, but without the smarts to reset it at an equinox or such like even the most primitive folks did in the Middle East.
So, you know, a doomsday event based on the Long Count calendar is using a calendar which was obsolete even for the Mayans for a looong time.
And then they kinda went full tilt into stupid land, with the Calendar Round, which snuck their old 13x20 Tzolkin calendar right back through the back door. (And without any lubricant
) Now instead of telling you a date consisting of year, month and day, they'd only tell you the month and day in the Tzolkin and Haab calendars.
For a modern day analogy, imagine that you were looking at prospective mates on a dating site, and instead of learning that she's born on the 8'th of April in 1980, you'd learn that she's born on the 8'th of April by the Gregorian calendar and the 14 of Nissan by the Jewish calendar. And it's up to you to do the maths and figure out when the heck that happened.
Of course, the above example is kinda illustrating the problem already, because those dates coincide for both 1980 and 1999. So you're either meeting a 31 year old girl, or may end up starring on To Catch A Predator
It was the same for that calendar, except not so quickly. The combination of Tzolkin and Haab has a perfect 52 year cycle. So if a combination of dates works out to, say, 1990, it also works for 1948 or 1886. So your prospective date could be either 21 years old or 73 years old.
Yeah, online dating must have sucked for the Mayans
