Its been quiet a while that I have written something especially something on any of the mysterious and unsolved obscurity. Since my last article on “Year 2012 i.e. Year 2012 What is our Fate? many people asked me if I would be writing more on this topic. So I thought I’ll share some more of my study I did on this topic and some related topics. But eventually when I started writing I had no idea that I would end up writing a mammoth article. Thus finally I had to split the article into several articles which I’ll post in succession.
Today I will give you some information about Mayan’s Calendar which actually started the spark of Year 2012. We talk about Mayan’s Calendar every time we talk about Year 2012 but have no idea what this calendar is all about & what message this calendar is trying to convey.

The Calendar:

Mayan’s Calender(Click on the image to enlarge)

Mayan’s Calendar which is also known as Aztec calendar. Unlike the calendar’s we have seen over the years this calendar is craved on the “sun stone” which is kept in the National Museum of Anthropology and History located in Mexico City.

Gregorian calendar (modern calendar is today) has days, weeks, and months and years whereas Mayan’s Calendar is not exactly similar but way more complex then the modern calendar rather it consists of not 1 but 3 calendars at the same time. The three calendars are known as religious calendar, solar calendar, and the long count.

Graphics Logo(Click on the image to enlarge)

Religious Calendar takes 260 days to complete one cycle or it can be said as religious cycle. Year consists of 20 weeks and 1 week carries 13 days. There are no months but weeks are given special names such which are represented by different graphical logos. (Doesn’t that remind you of Chinese calendar? And Chinese years which has names like year of rat or year of monkey)

Another calendar is the Solar Calendar which consists of 365 days like Gregorian calendar but it is divided into 18 months rather then 12 and each month holds 20 days each. If you calculate this comes out to be 360 days and there are 5 days missing so these 5 days are special days which the Mayan’s considered to be unlucky, no idea why they thought of this may be due to the fact that they don’t belong to any month. Similar to the religious calendar every month of solar calendar has a special name, logo as well as some special significance.

Of course you must be wondering that calculating the religious and solar calendar with weeks and months the forecast can be made for the specific date. But somehow whatever I have told you about the calendar hold nothing related to the prophecy of Gregorian year 2012. For that we have to understand the calendar which is the long count calendar.

If you have ever been to Mexico or have heard or seen a wooden mechanical calculators with gears that are sold in certain place over there. I have myself never been there and haven’t seen the calculator but I certainly want to get one soon. Look at the image below of the cogs or gears. The first two cycles could be thought of as cogs or gears moving through time, now the long count are a linear number of days, starting from the first day, “1,” and counting through each day to the present, mind it when I say first day then it is meant as the first day (that is what I understood). So any day in history can be recorded using the long count and, with some simple mathematics, the corresponding religious week and solar month can also be found. Now the days of long count are actually numbered in a very unusual system.

Gears of Solar Calendar (Click on image to enlarge)

Now this is little difficult to understand. Instead of writing numbers as we do, from right to left with each place being a multiple of 10 (i.e. 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1), the Mayans had only 5 places. The first place recorded a number from 0 to 20. To the left, the second place could have a range from 0 to 17; the third from 0 to 19; the fourth from 0 to 19 and the last from 0 to 12. The numbers were written from right to left, like our system, separated by a dot. Instead of multiples of 10, the first place had a multiple of 1 (like our system); the second place a multiple of 20; the third a multiple of 360; the fourth a multiple of 7200 and the fifth a multiple of 144000.

So a long count number, for example, could be written as 2.12.4.9.0 and would be calculated as follows:

(2 x 144000) + (12 x 7200) + (4 x 360) + (9 x 20) + (0 x 1) or a long count of 376020.
Thus the maximum number which can be recorded this way would be 12.19.19.17.20. This amounts to a long count number of 1,872,000 days or 5125.36 years of our Gregorian calendar. This atleast gives us the idea that surely this calendar is very old and so is the Mayan civilization.

Over the years, archaeologists have found carved monuments that recorded the long count for known dates in Mayan history. Once a date was fixed in time, it was easy to determine “day 1″ as August 11th, 3114 BC. And it was also easy to calculate the date at which the calendar would end — December 21st, 2012.

But just because an old, complex and very odd calendar ends on this day doesn’t means that there is a doomsday coming on that days. I would say NO!

There are many things which need to be reconsidered before coming to this conclusion and creating a panic amongst ourselves. But we need to look carefully about why Mayan’s never calculated a date beyond this point. We know that Mayan’s were great studier of stars and sun and without any doubts great astronomers. So to go deep into the topic of year 2012 we will now go into astronomy, astrophysics and somewhat archeology.


By the way guys, I am not trying to scare you or make a make that we are going to die on 21st dec 2012. I hope not, No Ways!!

Keep looking I am about to post some more facts related to this topic. Certainly this is just a start for what I have in store


I apologize if this article was too lengthy. Though I tried to keep it as short as I could, and guys do keep your comments flowing and raise a discussion.

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