The Earliest Known Maya Calendar
But the most striking discovery of all was made on the structure's east wall, where Saturno and his team uncovered neatly ordered columns of carefully rendered hieroglyphic texts and numerals.
"These bars and dots are really, really cool," explains David Stuart, an expert on Maya hieroglyphs at the University of Texas at Austin. "What these are giving us are time spans — not so much dates, but Maya notations of elapsed time." He continues:There's just enough preserved here for us to figure out the differences in time between the different columns, and they seem to be very standard. The interval between each of these columns was either 178 days or 177 days, and those numbers are really important in the lunar timekeeping of the ancient Maya. It seems pretty clear here that we have a lunar calendar.
A second set of columns, each depicting blocks of time between one-third to 2.5 million days into the future, is thought to depict the astronomical cycles of Mars, Venus and lunar eclipses. These figures, the researchers say, only serve to confirm what Maya scholars have long known to be true regarding society's obsession with 2012, that date's coincidence with the end of the Maya's 13-Baktun "Long Count" calendar, and the end of the world: that 2012 — while important insofar as it represented the end of a long-drawn Baktun cycle — was more akin to turning the page of a calendar to the Maya than it was the end of days."Baktun 14, Baktun 15, Baktun 16 were all going to be coming," said Stuart. "The Maya calendar is going to keep going, and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future. A huge number that we can't even wrap our heads around."
Saturno echoed Stuart's sentiments.
"The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this."
"We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."
The researcher's findings are published in today's issue of Science. The findings will also be presented in next month's issue of National Geographic.
