Seems the whole “end of the world in 2012” brouhaha is stirring again with the upcoming release of the special effects disaster film, 2012. While topics on this blog are often meant to be pretty scholarly and technical, I thought it useful to offer a simple run-down of important points about what the ancient Maya really had to say — or not — about the “end” of their calendar.
Does the Maya calendar end in 2012?
No it doesn’t. What will happen is a recurrence, an anniversary of sorts, of a key mythological date in the distant past. The Maya wrote this as 13.0.0.0.0 in their “Long Count” calendar (an abbreviation of a much bigger number), which fell on August 11, 3114 B.C. (some correlations of the two calendars say August 13, but I don’t really care). This “creation date” was not the beginning of everything, however. Maya mythological texts tell us that plenty was happening long, long before this starting point of the current era. On December 21, 2012 (some say December 23) we come again to a numerological recurrence of 13.0.0.0.0. The Long Count calendar continues well beyond this date, too. In fact, the numerology of the calendar demands that there will be other similar recurrences of this same date in the far distant future, on a scale of octillions of years. The scale of Maya time reckoning dwarfs anything in our own cosmology by many orders of magnitude.
What did the Maya say about 2012?
They actually said very little, if anything. Only one ancient inscription refers to the upcoming 13.0.0.0.0 date in 2012, from a now destroyed site named Tortuguero. The question we scholars have struggled with is whether the final few hieroglyphs of that text describe anything about what will happen. A few years ago I put forward a very tentative and incomplete reading of these damaged glyphs, including a possible use of a verb meaning “descend” and a name of a god, Bolon Yokte’. Much of it was iffy and remains so; I’m not sure I believe much of what I wrote back then. More recently my colleague Steve Houston has pointed out the glyphs may not even pertain to that date anyway. So there’s considerable ambiguity just in the reading of the glyphs and the rhetorical structure of the Tortuguero passage. What we can say with confidence is that the ancient Maya left no clear or definite record about 2012 and its significance. There is certainly no ancient claim that the world or any part of it will come to an end.
Who came up with this crazy idea?
New Age hacks and, now, Hollywood producers. The idea can be traced largely back to the novelist and mystic named Frank Waters, who in the 1960s and 70s wrote a number of novels and cultural treatises on Native Americans of the American southwest, including his 1963 work, Book of the Hopi (he was not an anthropologist). One of Waters’ last works was Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth Age of Consciousness (1975), an odd pastiche of Aztec and Maya philosophies wherein he proposed that the “end” of the calendar would somehow involve a transformation of world spiritual awareness. Waters’ ideas got picked up and expanded upon by Jose Arguelles in his insanely misguided but influential book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987). Many different writers have followed with their own strange books and essays on the “meaning” of 2012, mostly contradicting one another.
What about the astronomy?
The Maya were fine astronomers, but the 2012 date has little if anything to do with astronomy. Despite claims about the appearance of a “galactic alignment” in late December three years from now, modern scientific astronomers reject this notion pretty much out of hand. Besides, no ancient Maya text or artwork makes reference to anything of the kind.
What do the present-day Maya have to say about 2012?
Although the 260-day round of the ancient calendar system survived in a few areas of highland Guatemala, the 2012 date has nothing to do with it. It’s only associated with the Long Count, which ceased being used well before the conquest. So, any mention of 2012 by modern Maya peoples is probably an example of media or New Age influence.
So, in sum, what’s been widely circulated in the popular imagination about 2012 has little to do about true ancient Maya belief or notions of prophecy.
My brief comments will probably instigate even more endless 2012 discussion and debate, but I respectfully request that such exchanges be taken elsewhere. What more I have to say on the subject, mostly on the nature of the ancient calendar as a whole, will appear in my upcoming book about Maya time, appearing sometime next year.
Your blog post will hopefully stir the growing “community” of 2012 hoaxers. Now that the creationists have joined the circus we are up for an entertaining and frustrating three years to come. The most recent “theory” I have seen is that the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is part of the illuminati conspiracy to let us all live in oblivion of the upcoming disaster when planet Nibiru destroys the Earth in 2012 (of course also prophesized by Chinese, Egyptians, Hopi, Atlantis, Nostradamus, etc.). The galactic alignment seems to be so innocent in this company…
One thing that I find interesting is that Tortuguero Monument 6 records that the day 4 Ahau 3 Kankin is the ending of 13 baktuns. It doesn’t say the end of 1 pictun, which one would expect if the Maya actually counted 13 baktuns as forming 1 pictun. I think this is quite important as the Maya, when talking about Period Endings, don’t relate the ending of smaller units; they invariably describe the PE as the ending of the highest unit that turned over on that date. Katun endings, for example, aren’t described as the ending of a tun, or a winal etc.
Given how regular this pattern is, I think we can state that the only Maya text that mentions 2012 not only does not describe it as the end of the world, and not only does not describe this date as the end of the Maya calendar, it doesn’t even describe this event as the end of the Maya baktun cycle. From Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions we know that the scribes at that site counted 20 baktuns as forming a single pictun and Tortuguero Monument 6 conforms to this calculation. There is thus, as far as I know, not a single Maya text that indicates that 2012 is anything other than a normal “millenium” change for the Maya calendar. It isn’t even a point where the Maya calendar turns to 1 with a bunch of zeros after it.
So if 2012 wasn’t that important, why did the scribes of Tortuguero even mention it on their monument carved back in the 7th century? I think we have a pretty good idea of this as well. The end of 13 baktuns on a day 4 Ahau reflects the same units seen on the “creation date” thousands of years earlier. In addition, 4 Ahau was the latest Period Ending date (9.11.15.0.0, 4 Ahau 13 Mol) before the dedication of Monument 6 (dedicated 9.11.16.8.18, 9 Edznab 6 Kayab). So the like-in-kind nature of this future PE was of interest to the Maya scribe/astrologer and this is probably why the 2012 date was mentioned.
Thus I think we can not only say that the Maya didn’t describe 2012 as the end of their calendar, we have evidence that it wasn’t even the mother of all Period Endings that 2012ers would have us believe. For that, the end of 1 pictun, we’ll have to wait another 2700 years.
Good points Stan. I guess the main argument for the 13 Baktun “end date” is that this current “era” should be as long as the past one. However, there is no reason to believe this was the case. The 2012ers often conflate the Maya Long Count with the Aztec 5 Suns (such as Jenkins multiplying 5 with the length of the 13 Baktuns to come up with his Platonic year correlation). However, what is left out (among other things) is that the Aztec 5 Suns had different durations (being different multiples of 52 years). There is therefore no reason to believe that all Maya cycles were 13 Baktuns long as the inscription of the next piktun at Palenque indicates. But the main problem is of course the very mixture of Aztec (read: the Calendar Stone) and Maya calendars. As far as I can tell there are no mentions of 4 earlier creations/Suns in Classic period Maya inscriptions in the first place:
http://haecceities.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/2012-how-to-spot-a-prophet%e2%80%99s-maya-hoax-the-aztec-calendar-stone/
We all normally think of calendars as running in sequence from some starting point, as in Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Is it possible that the Maya were not counting from some starting point, like August 11, 3114 B.C., but were working toward some fulfillment, like a full Bactun count toward 2012? In other words, they were not counting from the start but counting toward the finish. Is there any any indication anywhere in their writings or inscriptions that they had that kind of psychology? If that were true we would have a totally different understanding of their purpose.
Often when the idea of a 2012 calamity is debunked, we are told that it is just the end of a cycle and start of a new cycle, and the Mayans did not predict anything bad for 2012. This is true. What is conveniently left out is what Mayan & Aztec myths had to say about the ends of the previous cycles – humankind being wiped out. 2012 doomsdayers are merely extrapolating the myths of the past, applying them to 2012, and warning of the possibilities.
I’d have more faith in an inert end of cycle if someone could explain why the Mayans chose a start date for their Long Count calendar so long before the existence of their civilization, or even that of the Aztecs. For if the start date has no meaning or importance, then perhaps the end date does… Or did they just randomly choose a date?
[...] genius Mayanist, David Stuart has written a terrific summary of what the Maya actually wrote about 2012 (not much!) and where the whole hoo-hah [...]
[...] for the moment, David Stuart, arguably the foremost expert on Mayan glyphs in the world, likewise spoke his own words of reassurance for informed lay readers, in which he clarified his previous [...]
[...] quero que os leitores confiem apenas na minha palavra de mero amador nestas andanças. Leiam este texto), estilo pergunta-resposta, escrito pelo Prof. David Stuart, da Universidade do Texas em Austin, [...]
So what ever happen to Monument 6? I have only found some drawings of glyphs and never any photographs of Tortuguero Mayan site on the internet. I did read somewhere that the site has been destroyed due to modern buildings covering the site?
Could someone recommend a book that would cover Tortuguero Mayan site?
Thank you
Hello Dr Stuart
Regarding the upcoming movie 2012. I am disgusted with Hollywood distorting and fictionalizing Maya text to make a buck. Another fine example of Hollywood running out of ideas to sell movies. I will say no more.
I saw you in on Nova’s, “Cracking the Maya Code” and was fascinated by your work (and the other scholars) on Maya Hieroglyphics. I am so pleased that the accumulation of many years of previous work has lead to the decipherment of the glyphs. Your work has allowed me to discover the rich history of my people( Guatemala).
[...] quero que os leitores confiem apenas na minha palavra de mero amador nestas andanças. Leiam este texto, estilo pergunta-resposta, escrito pelo Prof. David Stuart, da Universidade do Texas em Austin, [...]
agradesco infinitamente estas Aclaraciones, pues ud. Puede ver cuanta gente abusa y muchos se hacen ricos con la ignorancia de la gente, ojala los buenos estudios arqueologicos fueran mas espeditos y asi conocer lo mas apegado a la verdad y nosotros como guias de turistas poder proporcionar una informacion mas veras a nuestros visitantes en mi pais(mexico) y a nuestro pueblo.
atte. fernando alcocer
Thanks for this note, Dr Stuart… There’s a lot of wrong information in France too. That’s why I translated and resumed your note, adding other informations too sustain your opinion. It’s good to read really “informed” people who go agains the main stream of ideas.
I slightly disagree about their statement that modern Maya have nothing to say about it. it’s not so hard to integrate the day round into the long count, and Mayan scholars have been doing a lot of important work on translations and stuff, and the calender remains important in many communities, thus I do think that they might have some important insights on the nature of Maya cosmovision and conceptions of time. Although some are influenced by new age stuff, others are incorporating archeological findings into their maintained traditions, which is a very different thing.
Well, it’s important to make clear that the 2012 business is really only about the Long Count. Although the traditional 260-day calendar is still very much in use in parts of Guatemala and Mexico, it operates completely independently and doesn’t key in to any larger cycles involving Bak’tuns and the like. They are separate systems. By the way, I didn’t say the Maya have “nothing to say about it.” Some apparently do, even if some of their statements on 2012 are based on absorbed false claims from the outside, disguised as valid knowledge about the past. Most people, including my knowledgeable Maya colleagues, are aware that the 2012 phenomenon is a modern contrivance that originated out of pseudo-native mysticism of the USA — not from the Mesoamerican world.
I totally agree with your comment. In that the 2012 phenomenon is created by a frenzy of spiritualism, of sorts from the USA.
All of a sudden one starts to see far fetched ideas, mysticisms based upon 2012. I think it is a far reaching attempt to “see in to the future”.
Com’on, fellas and gals. Seems to me this is a lot more than pseudo-native mysticism. Since 1960 we can blow the world to smithereens. If some minds should tie this terminal event to a projected future in two more years they are only reflecting a fear that is in all of us. As Herbert Armstrong once said, he goes to sleep every night with a nuclear bomb under his pillow. World tensions are on the rise, a lot due to religious extremism. Near economic collapse does not help to relieve our concerns. This conceptual fear may arise in the USA, but I now a lot of people around the world who are into projecting the end in 2012. We should not so easily slough off a concern that ties events to dates. I think it rather uncanny that the ancient Maya should come up with a calendar system that just happens to terminate at this point in time. And what is this about 4 Ahua, any how?
I would like to know and understand howyou can correlate a particular gylph to an indian word.
Are you assuming that the indian language ( or particular dialect) has not changed in hundreds and hundreds of years.
How can you be certain that today’s indian language was spoken at a particular time?
I understand that in order to decipher what the glyphs say, you assume that the language spoken was a current indian mayan language.
What language are you using to decipher the glyphs? K’che?
Say,
What do you think of the current find, in Guatemala, El Mirador? Cnn has been commenting on it being the biggest pyramid in the world. All structures covered in jungle.
What a fantastic find!! But who is in charge of teh excavation? What university is he from.
According to CNN they also found a mint stella indicating a passage from the Popol Vuh.
For answers to your first mails I suggest you read these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script
http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/index.html
El Mirador has been known for over 80 years and is not exactly a new discovery:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mirador
I have some recent comments on the CNN documentary and other related issues on my blog:
http://haecceities.wordpress.com
[...] Mesoamerican Art at the University of Texas at Austin, has written a comprehensive and worthwhile Q&A blog post about 2012. Worthy of note are the following two [...]