CBCNews article on the ancient Maya and 2012 exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto

Here’s an excerpt from a great article called, “Did the Maya predict the world would end in 2012? Archeologists say Maya made no such prophecy.” The article is from CBCNews. here:

Click on the link above and you’ll be taken to the original article, which is full of information on the ancient Maya and 2012. The article is announcing a Royal Ontario Museum exhibit on the topic.

Here’s the quote:

“In a correlation of the Maya’s long-count calendar to our Western one, the end of this current baktun, the 13th, happens on Dec. 21, 2012 (or Dec. 23. See sidebar).

“The long-count calendar counts the time since creation, which the Maya date to what we would call a day in August 3114 BC.

“Dec. 21 vs. Dec. 23
Dec, 21, 2012 seems to be the most favoured date for when the 13th baktun on the Maya long-count calendar ends. But some sources, including the Royal Ontario Museum, go with Dec. 23.

“The two dates stem from two variations of the most used correlation of our calendar with the Maya’s.

“The ROM’s Justin Jennings said it went with Dec. 23 because, “there’s no evidence that the long count is linked to astronomical cycles” and the curators felt that Dec. 21 feeds into “2012 galactic alignment stuff, which just doesn’t hold water from an astronomy point of view and it does not work for classic Maya literature.”

“Maya expert David Stuart doesn’t care which date people choose but told CBC News that it is a complete coincidence that Dec. 21 will be the winter solstice. “Other baktun endings don’t really fall on important astronomical dates,” he noted.

“Obviously, baktuns have come and gone. This year just happens to be the one when the 13th baktun ends. The 12th baktun ended on Sept. 18, 1618, which was when Europe’s very destructive Thirty Years’ War was just getting started.

“Stuart writes that, “any such statements about the Maya predicting the world’s demise or alternatively, some ‘transformation of consciousness’ in 2012 is, to put it as simply and directly as possible, wrong.”

Did the Maya predict the world would end in 2012? Archeologists say Maya made no such prophecy

In this blog, I’ve written about David Stuart before. He is one of my heroes, because, by a wonderful set of circumstances, his parents were both archeologists and he spend part of his childhood with them at the Mayan ruin of Coba, which is within a half day’s drive from Cancun–I’ve been there twice, and I’ve included it my my travelogue, Yucatan Travel: Cancun to Chichen Itza.

From what I’ve read and seen about David Stuart, he had a Mayan nanny and so became prolific in Mayan. I remember seeing a Public Broadcasting Station special on deciphering the Mayan glyphs, in which David, at an early age–I think 16–was brilliantly decoding glyphs, helped by his fluency in present-day Mayan.