The year 2012 has been filled with the screams and cries of the paranoid and the uneducated as they make their claims that the end of the Mayan calendar marks the end of the world. December 2012 is supposedly the date, seeing as how a cycle that was important to the Mayans comes to a close. Unfortunately for these doomsday lovers, new archaeological finds are showing that what was thought to be the end of the Mayan calendar by many is, in fact, not even close.
An excavation in Xultun, Guatemala has unearthed some rather interesting Mayan murals. The site has been known of since the early 20th century and a few attempts have been made to clear the remains, but one little house went undiscovered until recently. Within this house, thought to be a scribe’s chambers, archaeologists found the oldest known records of Mayan astrological tables to date. These markings are from the early 9th century, which put them ahead of other known Mayan calendars by centuries.
Detailed on the walls of the house are numbers which appear to be equations. The calculations are a representation of numbers that track a cycle of 2.5 millions days. Accompanying these calculations are maps of astronomical cycles.
These finds tie together much of what is already known regarding Mayan concepts of time and map out a calendrical cycle that stretches 7000 years into the future. So, despite the belief that 2012 is the end times, the Mayans had already plotted for thousands of years beyond.
No doubt some will choose to ignore the evidence and still running screaming through the streets warning people that ‘the end is nigh,’ but that is relatively unimportant in the long run. What is important is that we are now one step closer to understanding this ancient Mesoamerican culture. Hopefully, more finds in the near future will turn up writings as old as these and give us even more clues about the Mayan’s beliefs and astronomical expertise.