mayan calender

It is not very often you here people talking about the Mayan calendar, however due to the release of the disaster epic, 2012 you may hear a lot more of the calendar which predicts the world will end in 2012.

Director Emmerich who seems to love destroying humanity in movies such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, has excelled himself in his latest movie laying siege to a number of international landmarks, with the Himalayas wiped out by a tsunami and L.A. saying goodbye thanks to a massive earthquake.

So is this destruction actually true to the prediction? Some experts say a no. Yet scholars are trying to assuring people that the Mayans didn’t predict the end of the world, just the birth of a new age. John Major Jenkins, who has written 10 books on the culture of the Mayan, agrees “the idea that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012 is actually not the case.”

The film is due for release this Friday. To read more on this story go to boxwish.com

Description of Maya calender:
The Maya calendar is a system of distinct calendars and almanacs used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and by some modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala.

These calendars can be synchronized and interlocked, their combinations giving rise to further, more extensive cycles. The essentials of the Maya calendric system are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 6th century BC. It shares many aspects with calendars employed by other earlier Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotec and Olmec, and contemporary or later ones such as the Mixtec and Aztec calendars. Although the Mesoamerican calendar did not originate with the Maya, their subsequent extensions and refinements of it were the most sophisticated. Along with those of the Aztecs, the Maya calendars are the best-documented and most completely understood.

By the Maya mythological tradition, as documented in Colonial Yucatec accounts and reconstructed from Late Classic and Postclassic inscriptions, the deity Itzamna is frequently credited with bringing the knowledge of the calendar system to the ancestral Maya, along with writing in general and other foundational aspects of Maya culture.