The Ancient Mayan Calendar

The Mayan Calendar has recently been the focus of a lot of interest for the past decade. The main reason for the public’s appeal, interest, curiosity and anxiety is the mayan calendar end of the world prophecy, which is said to take place less than two years from now, in 2012. The ancient Mayans are an indigenous civilization from Central America and had lived thousands of years ago around Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula; a group of people that are far advanced in their studies of astronomy and mathematics as well as being highly religious. The Mayan’s highly developed knowledge of astronomy and their creativity as well as culture is demonstrated through the discoveries of their pictorial alphabet as well as their drawings, the interpretations of which illustrate that the ancient Mayans existed even before the Spanish reached Central America.

Among the civilization’s systems that scientists and scholars now understand is the Mayan Calendar. The ancient calendar is a very advanced and mathematically precise system that calculates the movements of the sun and the moon and the shifts in the seasons. The Mayan calendar is very exact, more so than that of succeeding calendars had been designed and created years and years afterwards. And this mathematically precise capability of calculating days and months and years is one of the reasons why people from all over the globe believe in the end of the world 2012 forecasts. So now that we are all understand just how precise the ancient Mayan Calendar is, the next question we should be asking is how does the mayan calendar work?

The Mayan Calendar features three periods of time and can be viewed as three different dials on a single watch, each of these dials have a particular time scale. The first time period or dial, is the Long Count which equates to 1000's of years; the Haab which covers a ordinary 365 day period; and the Tzolkin which is the shortest time period and only covers a fortnight. Each dial is a finite system that covers certain times of starting and finishing points that enable its users to determine the specific start and end time of a month, year or even a millennium which is very much like the modern day calendars that we use.

The Mayans, a superstitious civilization, marks the end of each cycles which are called the Calendar Round, every 52 years, and is seen as an unlucky time. December 21st 2012 is a date that has become synonymous with Mayan and Aztec end of the world prophecies, because the longest time cycle in the Mayan Calendar, the Long Count Calendar, which is the only calendar in the history of the planet that dates back more than 5,000 years, will return to zero. Mayan astrology is known worldwide for its mathematical accuracy, so are we really now conscious of when the Earth as we know it, will all end?

By: Jimmy Barlow

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If you want to learn more about the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 prophecy phenomenon, visit our 2012 end of the world website.