Mayan masks history

From then on the Maya entered a period of decline and many of their cities emptied of people. Following the European discovery of the New World, Maya lands were conquered by the Spanish, and their culture was gradually influenced by that of the Old World, notably the widespread adoption of Roman Catholicism.

2) What is the connection between the Maya and 2012?

The Maya had several calendar systems to deal with different time scales. They had yearly calendars based on agricultural cycles, but also what is known as the Long Count calendar, for which a full cycle lasted 5, 126 of our years. Although the calendar was probably created just over 2, 000 years ago, it was dated backwards to have begun in the fourth millennia BC.

By following Maya calculations, experts have therefore pinpointed the end of the Long Count cycle to around December 2012, with 21 December being the most popular choice.

An illustrated Maya vase from Guatemala, AD 600-800. Such items were valued as status symbols for the Maya. (Trustees of the British Museum)

3) Did the Maya predict that the world would end in 2012?

Mayanists are fairly unanimous in answering with a resounding ‘no’. In The Order of Days: The Maya World and the Truth about 2012, Professor David Stuart is unequivocal: “No authentic Maya text foretells the end of the world in 2012, or of any destructive event happening in connection with the turn of the thirteenth Bak’tun [a sub-period in the Long Count].”

Matthew Restall is a Maya specialist at Pennsylvania State University. He is firmly against the apocalyptic scenario. “We don’t know for sure what they believed would occur and that’s part of the point. They didn’t write down in much detail what they thought was going to happen, and the way Mayanists interpret that is that it wasn’t something that was of concern to them. It was simply a resetting of the clock. It’s a bit like our own millennial calendar. We
get to 1999 and the next year is 2000 and that cycle continues until the end of the following millennium and begins again.”

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