Maya Archaeologists Unearth New 2012 Monument With 'End Date' of Dec. 21, 2012

[Unified Serenity]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0628181735.htm

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2012) — Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300-year-old-year Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called "end date" of the Maya calendar, December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic finds in decades, was announced June 28 at the National Palace in Guatemala.

"This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy," says Marcello A. Canuto, director of Tulane's Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at La Corona.


Since 2008, Canuto and Tomás Barrientos of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala have directed excavations at La Corona, a site previously ravaged by looters.
"Last year, we realized that looters of a particular building had discarded some carved stones because they were too eroded to sell on the antiquities black market," said Barrientos, "so we knew they found something important, but we also thought they might have missed something."


What Canuto and Barrientos found was the longest text ever discovered in Guatemala. Carved on staircase steps, it records 200 years of La Corona history, states David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at The University of Texas at Austin, who was part of a 1997 expedition that first explored the site.


While deciphering these new finds in May, Stuart recognized the 2012 reference on a stairway block bearing 56 delicately carved hieroglyphs. It commemorated a royal visit to La Corona in AD 696 by the most powerful Maya ruler of that time, Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' of Calakmul, only a few months after his defeat by long-standing rival Tikal in AD 695. Thought by scholars to have been killed in this battle, this ruler was visiting allies and allaying their fears after his defeat.


"This was a time of great political turmoil in the Maya region and this king felt compelled to allude to a larger cycle of time that happens to end in 2012," says Stuart.

So, rather than prophesy, the 2012 reference places this king's troubled reign and accomplishments into a larger cosmological framework.

"In times of crisis, the ancient Maya used their calendar to promote continuity and stability rather than predict apocalypse," says Canuto.

[Unified Serenity]

Mural Found On Walls a First for a Maya Dwelling; Painted Numbers Reflect Calendar Reaching Well Beyond 2012



ScienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets.


Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings -- one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms -- and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar.


One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya -- the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, reports archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation.


"For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," Saturno said. "It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard."


The discovery is reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science.

The project scientists say that despite popular belief, there is no sign that the Maya calendar -- or the world -- was to end in the year 2012, just one of its calendar cycles. "It's like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000," said Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, a coauthor of the Science paper. "The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over; the Maya just start over."


The mural represents the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house. "There are tiny glyphs all over the wall, bars and dots representing columns of numbers. It's the kind of thing that only appears in one place -- the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later. We've never seen anything like it," said David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, who deciphered the glyphs.


The vegetation-covered structure was first spotted in 2010 by Saturno's student Max Chamberlain, who was following looters' trenches to explore the site of Xultún, hidden in the remote rain forest of the Petén. Then, supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, Saturno and his team launched an organized exploration and excavation of the house, working urgently to beat the region's rainy seasons, which threatened to erase what time had so far preserved.


Xultún, a 12-square-mile site where tens of thousands once lived, was first discovered about 100 years ago by a Guatemalan worker and roughly mapped in the 1920s by Sylvanus Morley, who named the site "Xultún" -- "end stone." Scientists from Harvard University mapped more of the site in the 1970s. The house discovered by Saturno's team was numbered 54 of 56 structures counted and mapped at that time. Thousands at Xultún remain uncounted.


The team's excavations reveal that monumental construction at Xultún began in the first centuries B.C. The site thrived until the end of the Classic Maya period; the site's last carved monument dates to around 890 A.D. Xultún stood only about five miles from San Bartolo, where in 2001 Saturno found rare, extensive murals painted on the walls of a ritual structure by the ancient Maya.
"It's weird that the Xultún finds exist at all," Saturno said. "Such writings and artwork on walls don't preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a meter below the surface."


The Writing on the Walls

The house contains three intact walls, each telling its own story to researchers -- and posing its own mysteries:


The north wall
The north wall lies straight ahead as one enters the room. An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king's portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him "Younger Brother Obsidian," a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. "The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family," Saturno said.


Four long numbers on the wall representing one-third of a million to 2.5 million days likely bring together all of the astronomical cycles -- such as those of Mars, Venus and the lunar eclipses -- the Maya thought important, dates that stretch some 7,000 years into the future. This is the first place Maya archaeologists have found that seems to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Another number scratched into the plaster surface likely records the date -- 813 A.D., a time when the Maya world had begun to collapse.


The west wall
Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. "We haven't seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before," Saturno said. "It's clearly a costume of some kind." One of the figures is particularly burly, "like a sumo wrestler," and he is labeled "Older Brother Obsidian." Another is labeled as a youth.


The east wall
Although badly eroded, another black-painted human figure and remnants of others can be seen. But the wall is dominated by numerical figures, including columns of numbers representing counting and calendrical calculations. Some of the numbers track the phases of the moon; others try to reconcile lunar periods with the solar calendar. "Skywatching like this was a tool for predicting eclipses," Saturno said. One well-preserved section contains numerical notes painted in red that appear to be corrections to more formal calculations appearing alongside them.


"The most exciting point is that we now see that the Maya were making such computations hundreds of years -- and in places other than books -- before they recorded them in the Codices," Aveni said.
The scientists say the symbols reflect a certain world view. "The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this," Saturno said. "We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."


Note: William Saturno and his work at Xultún will be featured in the June issue of National Geographic magazine, which will be on digital newsstands Tuesday, May 15, and on print newsstands Tuesday, May 29. A video on the project is available at: http://bit.ly/K4wDHz. The mural was photographed as a high-resolution panoramic gigapan, creating a zoomable view for users to explore the painting details online: http://on.natgeo.com/KQHQWq.
cienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets.


One person commented on the above article to share:


[quote]Studies show that the 3 black Figures are Africans who were teaching the maya things such as astronomy, religion, and forms of calligraphy and writing. Either the Phoenicians, berbers, or Moors. Notice how the black figures are positioned and there head gear. If the mayans painted the murals around the same time, there was no need to paint them a different color such as black. The Material was present to make the brown skin mayan. I'm surprised Nat Geo gave a different false description, they should know this. /quote]

[Unified Serenity]

Mayan Calendar and the Gregorian Leap Year
March 7, 2012 By James Watt


There has been a bogus forward circulating Facebook and Twitter about the Mayan Calendar. It claims that the Mayans were unaware of our Leap Year system, therefore the world should have already ended. The forward going around reads:

There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013.
Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year…. so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago.

While I appreciate the ultimate goal of this forward, whoever wrote it is very misinformed. The current era (known to the Mayans as a baktun) does end on December 21, 2012. However, the world will not end; the calendar simply rolls over to the next baktun. It’s very similar to the Gregorian date of January 1, 2000.


And just like we celebrated the beginning of the new millennium, the Mayans would have celebrated the beginning of a new baktun. This was not something to fear.
Julius Caesar did modify the Roman calendar in 45BCE to include Leap Years. This new calendar was called the Julian calendar. As of the time of posting, today’s date on the Julian calendar is only February 23, 2012. This is because the Julian calendar adds a leap year every four years, meaning that each year is 365.25 days long.


In reality, one solar year is ~365.24219878 days. In order to correct Caesar’s mistake, it was changed in 1582 to a calendar year equal to 365.2425 days. This was done by skipping leap years that were divisible by 100 unless they are also divisible by 400. For instance, the following years would have been leap years under the Julian calendar, but are now skipped: 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900. Likewise, the following leap years were not skipped because they were also divisible by 400: 1600, 2000. This system, known as the Gregorian calendar, is what we use today.


The Mayan calendar is very inaccurate when calculating years. Not only did they not account for leap years, they were completely wrong about how many days were in a year. The Mayan “tun” is 360 days long, equivalent of 0.986 years.


However, the date of December 21, 2012, is not based on Mayan tuns. It is based on the total accumulation of days since the beginning of the Mayan calendar. It is commonly accepted that the first date on the Mayan calendar is August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, we must start on that date and count forward in time.


The Mayan baktun is the equivalent of 400 Mayan tuns (years). But remember, their years are only 360 days long. 400 x 360 = 144,000. Therefore, each Mayan baktun is a total of 144,000 days long.
As of the time of posting, the Mayan date is 12.19.19.3.11. The first number represents the baktun, the second number katuns (20 Mayan years), the third number is tuns (Mayan years), the fourth is uinals (20 day “weeks”), and the final number is the day. I know that I’m making some history nut cringe at my over simplification of the Mayan calendar; I’m using “years” and “weeks” to make things easy to understand.

On December 21, 2012, the first number in the Mayan calendar will change from 12 to 13, making it 13.0.0.0.0. The last time this happened was on September 18, 1618, when the current baktun started. As you have already imagined, the Mayan date on that day was 12.0.0.0.0. Obviously, the world didn’t end.


But how do we know that 13.0.0.0.0 will happen on December 21, 2012? First, we need to calculate the total amount of days required to reach the 13th baktun: 144,000 x 13 = 1,872,000 days.
If we start counting from August 11, 3113 BCE, we probably won’t get very far. I don’t know about you, but counting to almost 2 million isn’t something that I have time to do. Instead, use any date calculator to do the math. Sure enough, you’ll always arrive at the same date: December 21, 2012.


Update 4/26/2012: I would like to clarify a misconception about when the Mayan calendar began. Some date calculators convert everything before Oct 15, 1582 to the Julian calendar. This is because dates recorded in history during that time were recorded on the Julian system. I didn’t see any reason to convert it twice so I used August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar and counted forward. However, the Mayan calendar began September 6, 3114 BCE on the Julian calendar. If your calculator is using the Julian calendar for older dates, please keep this in mind. For more information, please read the original message that prompted this.


Update 5/20/2012: Some people still disagree with the date calculator and/or simply do not understand this article. I posted a comment below, showing all of the work required to count days on the Gregorian calendar, further proving that the calendar does end on Dec 21.


Update 6/25/2012: Some small mix ups with the year because certain Gregorian calendars use the year zero while others do not. Please see this comment from a very informed reader who explains it all.



The Aztec Sun Stone. Commonly, but incorrectly, shown to represent the Mayan calendar

[Unified Serenity]

Mr. Watt made more comments below his article:

The Mayans actually figured out that their calendar was wrong and devised another calendar, called the Haab. However, in order to deal with the unaccounted days per year, they added a 5 day period known as “Wayeb”. The Wayeb is a period of darkness and uncertainty – they believed that the portals between the mortal realm and the underworld dissolved during this time, causing demons to roam the Earth. No idea what they did about the left over 0.24219878 days.

One peer of Mr. Watt's shared this:

Actually suggesting this calculator is correct 1,872,000 days from August 11, 3113 BCE equals up to November 26, 2013 which is in respect the next 13th baktun. Theoretically speaking December 21, 2012 is only 1,871,660 days forthcoming of August 11, 3113. This information was provided via http://www.msevans.com/epilepsy/daysbetweendates.htm

Mr. Watt responded:

Thank you for peer reviewing my article. It’s always good to get second opinions. In this case, my article is still correct. On the page you provided, it says, “Leap year checking is correct for both Gregorian (after 15 Oct 1582) and Julian (before) dates, except for dates before 8 A.D. From 45 B.C. to 8 A.D. leap years followed a different rule, and the current version of this script does not account for that.” I did a pure Gregorian calendar calculation. In my article, it shows August 11, 3113 BCE on the GREGORIAN calendar as the start of the Mayan calendar. The Mayan calendar began on September 6, 3114 BCE on the Julian Calendar, which is the calendar your website is using to do BCE calculations. That calendar is very well done, but it’s for researching historical dates recorded on the Julian calendar. I skipped using this because it was an extra step of leap year calculations.


If you go to my original calendar calculator (http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/) and type in either 0.0.0.0.0 on the Mayan calendar or -3113 August 11 on the Gregorian Calendar, you will notice that the Julian calendar is -3114 September 6. If you now take the Julian date and apply it to the site you referenced (http://www.msevans.com/epilepsy/daysbetweendates.htm) and use 12/21/2012 as the end date, you will get exactly 1,872,000 days.


Thank you again, I always appreciate when people verify my work.

It so refreshing to see a proper discussion between truth seekers.


As for the Mayans depicting a new age and Earth crossing the Galactice Plane, I thought this comment was very interesting and concur:

The mere fact that you started this conversation by speaking of the zodiac and astrological ages immediately tells me that you are not a scientist or person of logical thinking. First, the entire foundation of astrology was so poorly designed that it’s off by months.


You’re completely wrong about your claim that the galactic equator will bring any change. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a snippet from an EarthSky.org article,

“Earth won’t physically cross the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in 2012, but Earth will cross the galactic equator in 2012. That’s nothing special! As seen from the sun, Earth does this every year – twice.”

[niki]

Posted by Unified Serenity (here)

As for the Mayans depicting a new age and Earth crossing the Galactice Plane, I thought this comment was very interesting and concur:

The mere fact that you started this conversation by speaking of the zodiac and astrological ages immediately tells me that you are not a scientist or person of logical thinking. First, the entire foundation of astrology was so poorly designed that it’s off by months.


You’re completely wrong about your claim that the galactic equator will bring any change. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a snippet from an EarthSky.org article,

“Earth won’t physically cross the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in 2012, but Earth will cross the galactic equator in 2012. That’s nothing special! As seen from the sun, Earth does this every year – twice.”

@Unified Serenity : I'm still quite 'new' to all of these 2012, Mayans stuff (but I can't stop swallowing the 'red pill' and keep journeying on board to seek for the ultimate Truth!).
On your last quote, do you mean it to be a sarcastic one, or do you really concur that nothing will happen as in 2012, after all your interesting analysis and posts above? Please explain more in sort of a 'layman' terms.

thanks
~warm regards from Indonesia~

[Unified Serenity]

Posted by niki (here)

Posted by Unified Serenity (here)

As for the Mayans depicting a new age and Earth crossing the Galactice Plane, I thought this comment was very interesting and concur:

The mere fact that you started this conversation by speaking of the zodiac and astrological ages immediately tells me that you are not a scientist or person of logical thinking. First, the entire foundation of astrology was so poorly designed that it’s off by months.


You’re completely wrong about your claim that the galactic equator will bring any change. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s a snippet from an EarthSky.org article,

“Earth won’t physically cross the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in 2012, but Earth will cross the galactic equator in 2012. That’s nothing special! As seen from the sun, Earth does this every year – twice.”

@Unified Serenity : I'm still quite 'new' to all of these 2012, Mayans stuff (but I can't stop swallowing the 'red pill' and keep journeying on board to seek for the ultimate Truth!).
On your last quote, do you mean it to be a sarcastic one, or do you really concur that nothing will happen as in 2012, after all your interesting analysis and posts above? Please explain more in sort of a 'layman' terms.

thanks
~warm regards from Indonesia~

Hey Niki, I did not write that, but agreed with it. People are very much in arms over the cycles and how the dots have been connected for them. I think we live in a turbulent world. This is my gut feeling about 2012 now. There is nothing cosmic that is going to happen. We do see man via world leaders, media, and religious leaders hyping 2012. I whole heartedly believe in a top of the pyramid cabal. I think they are going to use 2012 to their best to move us into more controlled living. If it takes another 911 type of orchestrated disaster, they will make sure we get one. If we are finally ready to believe in aliens and they can produce enough special effects to get us to believe we are under attack, they will do it. If they can do anything to forward the progress on a one world global government they will do it. They want to reduce the population by several billion people. I think a disease created by them targeting certain groups is just the ticket in their eyes. It something that upsets people naturally, they demand the governmend do something, and by god they shall do something.

So, going back to your question, I do not think it was sarcastic in that they did not mean what they said. I think they meant exactly what they said,

“Earth won’t physically cross the plane of our Milky Way galaxy in 2012, but Earth will cross the galactic equator in 2012. That’s nothing special! As seen from the sun, Earth does this every year – twice.”

The plane and the equator are two different things.