The Maya Precision

The Long Count Calendar

The Maya developed one of the most precise calendar systems of the ancient world. The Long Count Calendar counts the days since a mythical creation date: August 11, 3114 BCE (according to the GMT correlation).

[Long Count Calendar] This dating is scientifically established - we can correlate Maya dates with our calendar.

The Structure

A complete cycle encompasses 13 Baktuns - that is 1,872,000 days or approximately 5,125 years.

The Mathematical Coincidence

Here is where it gets interesting. Let's calculate:

Five Maya cycles correspond to the precession cycle with an accuracy of 99.44%.

Coincidence?

The Problem with Coincidence

Imagine you roll a die for a number between 1 and 10,000. The chance of hitting the exact right number is 0.01%.

The Maya did not roll randomly. They calculated. But if they happened to choose a cycle that almost perfectly matched precession - that would be a hit with less than 1% deviation.

With a random choice, the expected deviation would be much greater.

The Scholarly Debate

[Anthony Aveni] Some researchers - including Barbara MacLeod, Michael Grofe, and Anthony Aveni - suspect that certain Maya dates were tuned to precession cycles.

The argument for it

• The Maya observed the sky with extreme precision
• They tracked Venus cycles over centuries
• They calculated eclipses centuries in advance
• They had numbers for time periods of millions of years

Why should they not have noticed precession?

The argument against it

• There is no explicit mention of precession in Maya texts
• The 5:1 correlation could be coincidental
• We may be projecting modern knowledge onto ancient cultures

The Other Calendars

The Maya were not alone. Around the world, we find calendar systems based on great cycles:

[Platonic Year] Plato himself spoke of the "Great Year" - the cycle after which all planets return to their original positions. The Greeks estimated it at approximately 26,000 years.

The Inscriptions of Quirigua

On Stele C in Quirigua (Guatemala), dates are found that reach millions of years into the past. The Maya thought in time scales that make our history ridiculously small.

For the Maya, time was not linear. It was cyclical. What happened once would happen again. The ending of one world was the beginning of the next.

2012 - The End of a Cycle

On December 21, 2012, the 13th Baktun of the current Maya cycle ended. Pop culture prophesied the end of the world.

What did the Maya themselves say? Nothing of the kind.

For them, it was simply the end of a cycle - like New Year's Eve, only bigger. The world does not end at midnight. It begins anew.

[Maya Scholars] Maya scholars like David Stuart emphasized that the apocalypse interpretation was a Western projection, not Maya theology.

The Real Question

Whether the Maya knew about precession or not - they built a calendar that:

• Functioned accurately over millennia
• Mapped great cosmic cycles
• Fit almost perfectly with precession
• Spoke of cycles that end and begin anew

Where did this knowledge come from?

The conventional answer: centuries of careful sky observation.

The alternative question: Who taught the observers?

Gobekli Tepe - The Elephant in the Room

Shortly after the end of the Younger Dryas - when the Maya calendar system did not yet exist - someone erected Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia:

• The oldest monumental architecture of humankind
• 6,000 years older than the pyramids
• Built by alleged "hunter-gatherers"
• With astronomical alignments

On Pillar 43 - the "Vulture Stone" - are carvings that some interpret as a star map. A star map said to show the sky at the time of the Younger Dryas impact.

[Gobekli Interpretation] This interpretation is highly speculative. But it raises a question:

If a catastrophe destroyed the knowledge of an earlier civilization - where would the survivors preserve it?

In stone. In calendars. In myths of world endings and new beginnings.