Quote:
Originally Posted by Fazor
AFAIK, the Mayan calendar years were not numbered 0 (or 1) to 2012. The Mayan calandar was a set of divisions that accurately accounted for days and years based on the earth's orbit around the sun (like the Gregorian calender we use today).
For all I know, the start of each Mayan year might have been April 23rd on our calendars. I don't know how the years were broken down other than by number of days. But it's not important, because we don't talk about the Mayan calendar in terms of Mayan dates. We talk about the Mayan calendar in terms of Gergorian dates.
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Actually, that is not quite right (or I don't understand your point). The Mayans most definitely counted years (and days too). If a ruler fought a battle 12 years and 63 days after the start of his reign, it was the same 12 years and 63 days in the Mayan calendar as ours. They even took care of leap years, though they did it slightly differently than we do. The
wikipedia article isn't a bad starting point. There is a very detailed, technical discussion
here (Word document).
But the key question from bmpbmp is how to align the two calendars. I know we have talked about this before and I even posted some links. I'm going to be somewhat lazy and not search them out again, but they are somewhere in the forum. I did find
this explanation of the correlation. From the linked article:
Quote:
The most widely accepted correlation is a variation on the oldest effort to match the long count to the European calendar. In 1897, Joseph Goodman (an American journalist who was Mark Twain's first editor), proposed that the Maya creation date, the zero long count, was in 3114 BC. Goodman's correlation was supported by the work of a Yucatecan scholar, Juan Martinez, but other correlations were more popular until J. Eric Thompson revived interest in Goodman's correlation in 1927. His work was supported by the astronomical discoveries of J.E. Teeple in 1930. Thompson reviewed the evidence again in an influential study of the question in 1937. He was able to narrow down the range of possible base dates to three days. The correlation he proposed is now usually referred to as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation. The base dates he identified are correlation constants used to convert long counts to European calendar dates:
11 August 3114 BC (Gregorian) 6 September 3114 BC (Julian)
12 August 3114 BC (Gregorian) 7 September 3114 BC (Julian)
13 August 3114 BC (Gregorian) 8 September 3114 BC (Julian)
Each correlation constant is also expressed as a Julian Day Number (JDN). See below.
The choice between these three dates is still hotly debated, but almost all Mayanists accept one of the versions of the GMT correlation.
Nothing, as they say, is certain except death and taxes. But the GMT correlation seems nearly as certain as any deduction from the available evidence can be. Its wide acceptance survived even the drastic revision of Maya scholarship when Thompson's intellectual hold on the field was broken by a new generation of scholars. The alternatives have few supporters among Mayanists. Yet when I searched the web for information on the correlation question, I failed to turn up any account of the arguments supporting the GMT correlation. I did, however, find defenses of at least eight alternative correlations. In the result, I fear it is all too easy for new students of the Maya to get the impression that the GMT correlation is dubious, or worse, an example of academic myopia. Some internet savants even hint darkly at conspiracy
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There is A TON of more information about the difficulties of the correlation on the website.
@bmpbmp - I don't mean this in a rude way, but So What. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Mayans had any particular insight into the end of the world and there is no particular reason to think that the Mayans thought anything more of the end of a Calendar Round then we did of the year 2000. Other than the potential (unfullfilled) of computer problems, the world didn't end in 2000 either. I don't see why it matters.