How often have you heard someone
say: "Don't worry, it's not the end of the world..."?
Well, what if they were
wrong?
Over the last few years more and
more people have been picking up on an apparent prophecy made by
the Mayans which predicts that the world will end this year, on the
21st December
2012.
But before anyone decides that
there is no point buying any Christmas presents this year, let's
find out who the Mayans were, why people think they predicted the
end of the world and whether or not we should be worried about
it...
Who were the Mayan
people?
The Maya civilisation stretched
across a large part of Central and South America and lasted for
nearly 2000 years. Although we remember them for some
gruesome reasons (they really liked human sacrifices), they had
other things going for them.
Their language is still taught in
some places, and words like "shark" and "cocoa" have their roots in
Mayan. Even better, without the Mayans we may never have had
chocolate! The richest Mayan people drank a lot of cocoa, starting
about 1700 years ago, and over the years that luxury has turned
into the chocolate we all know and love.
What do the Mayans have to
do with science?
The Mayans were:
- astronomers
- mathematicians
- engineers
They built structures that still
exist today, even after the majority of Mayan people have been
absorbed into other cultures in Latin America. They measured
the solar year (the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun)
and lunar cyles very accurately. They also studied the way that
Venus moves and could predict when it would appear very
precisely.
The Temple of Kukulkan at
Chichen Itza (c) cc Tørrissen
Why do people think that
the Mayan people predicted the end of the world?
The Mayans did an amazing job of
working out how long the Earth takes to travel around the sun,
measuring it more accurately than European scientists had at that
time.
However, when it came to days,
months and years the Mayans used several different ways of counting
them. The solar calendar (the nearest to the one we use) was
365 days long, but another calendar was made up of 20 periods of 13
days, starting again every 260 days.
Mayan maths...
When Mayans wanted to look at
longer periods of time they used a Long Count calendar. This system
is hard to explain, but let's give it a go...
We normally count in
tens - the decimal system - but the Mayans tended
to count in twenties. We have 7 day weeks,
with 52 weeks in a year. The Mayans used different groups
like:
- 20 days (a winal)
- 18 winals (a tun)
- 20 tuns (a k'atun)
- 20 k'atuns (a b'ak'tun)
Try thinking in terms of days,
weeks, years, decades and centuries and you'll get the idea.
The thing is, that once you reach a
b'ak'tun (that's 144,000 days) then the whole thing starts again.
And this is where people start to get worried...
You see, according to the calendar
that archaeologists and historians use when studying the Maya, the
21st December 2012 is the date when the 13th
b'ak'tun ends.
Some bright sparks over the years
have got hold of the fact that 13 was a significant number to the
Mayan people and this is where the idea of an apocalypse in 2012
took hold.
Should we be
worried?
In a word... no! Whatever Hollywood
movies and modern day prophets might suggest, there is really very
little evidence that the Mayans even believed that the world was
going to end in 2012.
Although the Mayans did believe
that the 144,000 day b'ak'tun cycles were important, the end of
them was celebrated rather
than feared. And while the number 13 might have had some
importance, ancient Mayan manuscripts have nothing in them that
suggest they thought the world would end.
It would seem that the idea came
from an archaeologist in the 1960s (who also used to be a spy, by
the way - very Indiana Jones) but these days vhardly any
researchers agree with him.
What do the experts
say?
Last week a large group of experts
met together
in Mexico to discuss the Mayan Long Count calendar. Their
overwhelming conclusion: the Mayans may have predicted droughts, famines and solar
eclipses but they never said that the world would end this
year.
Even NASA have felt the need to
get involved. Their website looking at the alleged 2012
doomsday, and in particular the catastrophes depicted in Roland
Emmerich's movie 2012, is well worth a
look.
It would appear that what the
Mayans have left for us is a complicated calendar, some tricky
maths and lovely hot chocolate - not bad!
Better do that Christmas shopping
after all...