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12 posts tagged mayan
New secrets from the upcoming documentary “Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond” were revealed this week.
Producer Raul Julia-Levy told The Wrap about a new theory that the Mayans did not predict the end of the world in December, but rather the start of devastating changes.
Filmmakers will show how the Mayans predicted that over three quarters of the world’s population will be wiped out over the next two decades.
The key to human survival? According to Julia-Levy, it will be space colonization. The documentary will reportedly also show how the Mayans already traveled to space.
Outlandish? Maybe. But we’re intrigued.
Filming of the doc begins in Mexico this month.
Will December 21, 2012 mark the end of the world as we know it?
Today is exactly a year until we find out.
For those who haven’t heard, 12-21-2012 marks the “end” of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was created and used by the Maya civilization to count cycles of 144,000 days.
Next year, the 13th cycle or Baktun (5,126 years) comes to an end and the Mayans did not leave a record of the next period. This - of course - leads to speculation that the world is ending.
While we wait to find out, explore some of the signs we’ve seen this year:
Doomsday averted?
A number of ‘experts’ went on the record last week to state we will not see the end of the world in 2012.
The prophecy is said to be based on a stone tablet thought to be 1,300 years old.
Sven Gronemeyer, who studies the Mayans at La Trobe University in Australia, believes the tablet was cracked so the hieroglyphs were illegible and given the wrong meaning. He believes the table simply references a Mayan god – not human civilization.
Specialists suggest that the prophecy of Bolon Yokte’s return doesn’t necessarily mark the end of the world.
The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico stated that the prophecy itself represented a profound lack of understanding by western academics about the mind set of the ancient Mayans.
“The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans,” said the institute in a statement to Reuters.
Well, time will tell.
Mexico’s archaeology institute announced that a second reference to December 21, 2012 exists at a southern Mexico ruin site.
This is the second such artifact acknowledged by the institute, which said in a statement that the newest finding is an inscription on the carved face of a brick.
Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricks. The institute made the discovery “years” ago but the brick has not been put on display.
Both the original Tortuguero tablet and the newly announced Comalcalco brick were probably carved about 1,300 years ago.
The Tortuguero inscription describes something involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.
Damage to the tablet makes the end of the passage almost illegible, but it’s thought to reference devastation coming from the sky.
There will be a conference of Mayan experts held next week to discuss the interpretations of the Mayan Long Calendar.
