Mayans not so worried about 2012 after all

So much for the 2012 end of the world. This is, supposedly, the year that Mayans warned the apocalypse would come. But, according to a study in the journal Science, Mayan calendars recently discovered in the ruins of Xultun go well beyond 2012.

USA Today reports:

“The numbers we found indicate an obsession with time and cycles of time, some of them very large,” Saturno says. “Maya scribes most likely transcribed the numbers on the wall in this room into (books) just like the ones later seen by conquistadors.”

Explorers first reported the site of Xultun, once a large Maya center, in 1915. But it was only two years ago that National Geographic Society-funded archaeologists noted a small residential room partly exposed by looters. The room’s walls proved to hold murals and small, delicate hieroglyphs inscribed in rows between paintings of scribes and rulers that not only corresponded to a 260 day ceremonial calendar and 365-day year, but the 584-day sky track of Venus and 780-day one of Mars.

Examination of the rows shows they are columns of numbers and symbols similar to lunar eclipse calculations found in early 16th century Maya writings that tied astronomical events to rituals. Some of them include dates corresponding to a time after the year 3500.

Read the rest here and more from the Christian Science Monitor here.