Archeologist: Mayans Did Not Predict Apocalypse
December 19, 2012
The Internet has been abuzz with rumors that the world will end - or at least be transformed - on Friday, December 21, when a 5,125-year-old Mayan calendar comes to a close. But archeologists say the rumors are wrong: the ancient Mayans did not predict an apocalypse. VOA's Jerome Socolovsky went to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology in Philadelphia, which decided to have a little fun with the rumors.
The Maya 2012 exhibit greets you with fictionalized images of the apocalypse.
"So many of the objects in this gallery came from excavations carried out by our museum," said Loa Traxler, the exhibit's curator and an authority on Mayan civilization.
She says earthquakes, floods and other cataclysmic events can and do happen, but ...
"None of those things were predicted by the ancient Maya as pre-ordained occurrences for December 21," she said.
Traxler says the predictions are really the product of a modern-day preoccupation with the end times.
"Authors and bloggers today want to assert that there was ancient wisdom and ancient prophesies coming from the Maya people before the [Spanish] conquest, that tells us the end is nigh, that these dramatic and disastrous things are right on our doorstep. The Maya associated none of those things with these calendar cycles," she said.
She says they simply loved to assign meaning to numbers. "They developed a very sophisticated calendar system very much focused on giving context to their histories and biographies and their contemporary day events," she said.
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