Archaeology & History

Was the Mayan calendar end date wrong ?

By T.K. Randall
March 29, 2013 ·  33 comments

Image Credit: Bruno Girin Last year paranoia over a potential 'end of days' coinciding with the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21st reached fever pitch. Ultimately, as many predicated, nothing happened at all and the doomsday date came and went without incident. Some doomsayers have refuted the date as incorrect, believing that the actual apocalypse will take place in the future. Author Dale King however has an alternative theory - he believes that the Mayan calendar actually ended eight years earlier on December 26th, 2004.

"The Maya correlated the beginning date of their calendar to the birth of their deities," he wrote. "Yet, according to Maya researcher John Major Jenkins, the GMT correlation - the correlation of the Maya calendar with the Gregorian calendar - was based on a text found in Palenque, a text interpreted as stating that the current Great Cycle began when the deity known as “First Father” was eight years old and came to Palenque. If what Jenkins says is true then the calendar should begin when the deity was born, not eight years later."[!gad]Last year paranoia over a potential 'end of days' coinciding with the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21st reached fever pitch. Ultimately, as many predicated, nothing happened at all and the doomsday date came and went without incident. Some doomsayers have refuted the date as incorrect, believing that the actual apocalypse will take place in the future. Author Dale King however has an alternative theory - he believes that the Mayan calendar actually ended eight years earlier on December 26th, 2004.

"The Maya correlated the beginning date of their calendar to the birth of their deities," he wrote. "Yet, according to Maya researcher John Major Jenkins, the GMT correlation - the correlation of the Maya calendar with the Gregorian calendar - was based on a text found in Palenque, a text interpreted as stating that the current Great Cycle began when the deity known as “First Father” was eight years old and came to Palenque. If what Jenkins says is true then the calendar should begin when the deity was born, not eight years later."

Source: Popular Archaeology | Comments (33)

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