Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyrotex
This entire Mayan 2012 scare is based on ONE fact: the biggest and most complete Mayan "wheel" calendar that we have found only goes as far as 2012 CE.
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It isn’t accurate to say that the
Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar runs out of dates on 21 Dec 2012. According to the most accepted interpretation (the most accepted GMT correlation), 20 Dec 2012 is LC 12.19.19.17.19, 21 Dec is LC 13.0.0.0.0, 22 Dec is LC 13.0.0.0.1, and so on.
It will run out of digits, like our
Gregorian calendar did on Jan 1 1000, on 11 July 4378, and even then, there’s no reason it couldn’t just gain another digit, as our Gregorian calendar did, to advance from 19.19.19.17.19 to 1.0.0.0.0.0.
The Long Count also isn’t the Mayan wheel calendar. The Wheel calendar is 18980 days (260 x 365 / GCF(260,365) = 260 x 365 / 5), about 14 days less than 52 years, long (and thus not much good for describing event more than 52 years in the future of past). The Long Count is just a base 20 number, except for the second least significant digit, which is base 18. The two don’t sync up very well, with the LC rolling over two least significant digits on a Wheel rollover about every 935.4 years, three digits about every 18707.2.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyrotex
But gee, don't nearly ALL calendars, from whoever, extend only just so far?
The calendar on my wall (showing Hubble photographs) extends only as far as December 31, 2009.
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Neither the Long Count nor the Wheel is a calendar in the sense that modern wall calendars are – they’re not planners, but more like the digital date displays on a watch, computer, or cellphone display, marking a specific day (though in the case of the Wheel, not uniquely).
Quote:
Originally Posted by modest
The long count ends on Dec. 21, 2012? That's a solstice. That seems incredibly odd to me.
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This is odd to me, too.
Some history of the anthropological problem of translating Long Count to Gregorian dates – the correlation problem – is useful.
This webpage seems to me to present a good brief history. In short, however, the best anthropologists’ guesses as to what Gregorian calendar date LC 13.0.0.0.0 falls actually are actually 19, 20, 21 (the 3 possible Goodman, Martinez, Thompson dates) or 23 Dec 2012 (Lounsbury’s date).
The reason for this uncertainty is that the Long Count fell into disuse before documented European contact with the Mayan’s, so none of the Mayan’s with whom European could compare dates knew what the LC date was, only the wheel date. As explained at the preceeding linked-to page, this required much research and guessing to work around.
Quote:
Originally Posted by modest
How could the Mayans create a calender more than 1,000 years ago knowing it would end on a solstice in our time?
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As I noted above, the LC doesn’t end on 13.0.0.0.0, but even just a four-digit rollover falling on an astronomically important date is remarkable.
I’ve not been able to find any documentation supporting this idea, but when GMT and Lounsbury worked on their calculations from about 1890 to 1940, it’s possible one of the proposed correlation factor was chosen in part to have 13.0.0.0.0 fall exactly on the solstice.
The last time the LC rolled over 4 digits, 12.0.0.0.0, was according to the most popular GMT date 18 Sep 1618, a date
AFAIK astronomically unremarkable.
We discussed this about a year ago, around
post #24 of the strange claims thread
All the Truth about 2012.
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The Long Count and Wheel calendars, and the Correlation problem
