End of the world December 2012
A not so pocket-sized calendar
The Mayan civilization rose to power in Southern Mexico over the course of 2000 years, aside from the mass human sacrifices to their gods they were highly advanced, with written language extensive use of mathematics, astronomy and agriculture. The entire civilisation suffered a decline after 900 AD. It’s still not yet known what caused this decline but theories such as overpopulation, and 100 year droughts may go someway towards answering that.
Ritual sacrifices weren
The Mayan Pyramid Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Serves as an incredibly accurate calender, it was built around 1050 and has 365 steps. Their calender was adopted by other civilisations, the Aztec and the Toltec. The Mayan calender is even more accurate than the Gregorian calender.
The Maya method of reckoning time involved counting forward from a hypothetical fixed point and expressing the date in time periods based on the number 20 and counted in intervals of 1, 20, 360, 7200, and 144,000 days. The Mayans used 3 different dating systems at the same time. the Long Count, the Divine Calender, and the Civil Calender. The Long Count represents the number of days since the start of the Mayan Era.
To summarise they believed the Long Count for their era started in 3114BC ( their idea of the creation of the world). There’s a little bit of debate on the exact day, but the majority of sites seem to settle on the 11th or 13th of August as the exact date. The Long count resets every 5,126 years. December 21st 2012 or December 23rd 2012 is seen as the end of that Era.
There are many that say that the date surrounding the end of the era will mean the end of the world, or a complete rebirth of that era. Surprisingly there are many more predictions that predict the end of the world or a ‘reset of the planet’ in 2012 which we’ll cover
It’s interesting to note that so far the earliest human writing found (in Pakistan in 1999) so far dates back to around 3300-3200 BC which predates the start of the current Mayan era. As a footnote the
Tărtăria tablets are supposed to date back to 5500 BC.
Further reading.
http://www.mayan-calendar.com/topic_longcount.php
