A new Mayan discovery has the archaeology community talking about an older calendar that was located on the wall of an ancient small room that could refute doomsday and the theory that the end of the world is coming.
The archeologists believe this new calendar dates back 1,200 years, the one that has been interpreted by some to predict the end of the world on December 21st 2012 is only about 600 years old. They believe of the older writings, by what would have been royal scribes, the Mayans used the walls as sort of a blackboard to keep astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar.
Experts studying the wall calendar say that there is no prediction of a world ending event, but rather it goes on for many years.
“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.”
Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., an expert on Mayan astronomy says that the calendar includes a time span of 6,000 beyond 2012. “Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” Aveni asks. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on,” he says.
The discovery of the room about 6 feet square in a large complex of ruins in a Xultun rain forest was reported in the Friday issue of the journal Science, by Aveni and others. It contains recordings of lunar cycles in 6-month chunks and a very complex calendar with dots and stacked bars representing numbers, along with a portrait of a seated king.
The researchers believe the tracking of the lunar cycles were for being able to predict future cycles, so that the king could be advised on good times to go to war and how successful the crops would be for the year.
Experts say that the Mayan’s kept time in 400 year spans called b’ak’tun’s and that the 13th b’ak’tun ends on December 21st, but there are a total of 24 b’ak’tun’s in the calendar.
The researchers say they are only scratching the surface of the new discovery and expect to uncover much more information out of this discovery in the future.