Maya ‘End of the world’ myth – Nottingham wakes sunny side up!

I run a website for St Ann's, and already I Have

had a steady stream of Emails & comments over the last few hours about the

end of the world – "The end is neigh." One contributor even sent me a quote

from the late Eric Morecambe: "If you want to be a goanna, buy a record by Des O'Conner."

 

http://stonebridge-park-nottingham.com/

 

The Maya Calendar comes to a close at precisely

the date and time of the December solstice which is at 11: 11 Am., although I

doubt anything will happen today.

 

The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization,

noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian

Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and

astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period (c.

2000 BC to AD 250).

 

The Maya centres of the southern lowlands

went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly

thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental

inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction. No universally

accepted theory explains this collapse.

 

In common with the other Mesoamerican

civilizations, the Maya had measured the length of the solar year to a high

degree of accuracy, far more accurately than that used in Europe as the basis

of the Gregorian calendar. They did not use this figure for the length of year

in their calendars, however; the calendars they used were crude, being based on

a year length of exactly 365 days, which means that the calendar falls out of

step with the seasons by one day every four years. By comparison, the Julian

calendar, used in Europe from Roman times until about the 16th Century,

accumulated an error of only one day every 128 years. The modern Gregorian calendar

is even more accurate, accumulating only a day's error in approximately 3,257

years.

 

The Maya calendar is complex involving different

cycles for the Sun & Moon.

 

The Maya calendar doesn't end in 2012, as

some have said, and the ancients never viewed that year as the time of the end

of the world, archaeologists say.

 

But December 21, 2012, was nonetheless

momentous to the Maya.

 

It's the time when the largest grand cycle in

the Mayan calendar -- 1,872,000 days or 5,125.37 years -- overturns and a new

cycle begin.

 

The Maya kept time on a scale few other

cultures have considered.

 

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented

the Long Count -- a lengthy circular calendar that transplanted the roots of

Maya culture all the way back to creation itself.

 

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs

out on the current era of the Long Count calendar, which began at what the Maya

saw as the dawn of the last creation period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya

wrote that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, as

Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

 

In December 2012 the lengthy era ends and the

complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning

another enormous cycle.

 

The idea is that time gets renewed, that the

world gets renewed all over again -- often after a period of stress – in the

same way we renew time on New Year's Day or even on Monday morning at midnight

on New years Eve.

 

Our website will continue into 2013 printing

updated news item, and I have no doubt that the Evening Post will do the same.

 

So Des O'Conner can rest assured that we will

be able to continue buying his records this Christmas!