[quote]Elegua360 wrote:
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]Elegua360 wrote:
[quote]Hold Up wrote:
I prefer celebrating the older version myself.[/quote]
I love how, on the internet, just because someone posts something with proper grammar, and the principle sounds plausible, it’s accepted as fact.
I saw the same thing when people ‘disproved’ the Maya 2012 thing by talking about the leap year.[/quote]
Yeah, they kinda did disprove it with the leap year. It was an ancient prophecy, two incompatible calendars and crucially, we didn’t die. [/quote]
facepalm I have to honestly ask, are you being serious? Just in case you are…
No. That is a very silly assertion to say that the Maya calendar was disproven by…the leap year.
They ‘disproved’ it with the fact that there was no Mayan 2012 prophecy to begin with.
The comments on the leap year were based on total ignorance of the calendar itself, and on some people taking the assertions about the non-prophecy at face value.
Allow me to explain.
Believe it or not, a Calendar from ~200 BCE, carved in Central America, did not actually say, “December 21st” on it. Amazing, right? No, the calendar was and always has been based on the relative position of earth, sun, and various stellar bodies. Modern researchers in turn took the calendar’s calculations, and then saw that this end date for the baktun* happened to be on the winter solstice of 2012.
It had ALWAYS accounted for the same drift in seasons that our calendar accounts for by using the Leap Year. In fact, up to about the 19th to early 20th century (LONG after the leap year was introduced to our calendar), the Maya calendar remained slightly more accurate in terms of staying true to the relative drift in seasons, compared to the Julian-Gregorian calendar, even with that calendar’s leap year calculations.
The calculation of the date of December 21st was based on when the 13th baktun of the long count calendar came to an end, which was incidentally on a winter solstice.
In case you didn’t check your calendar, December 21st was indeed on a winter solstice. The calendar calculated its own baktun end date perfectly well.
If the ‘leap year’ assertion was remotely valid, the calendar would not have ended on a winter solstice.
The leap year assertion was either a prank to see how far a rumor would go on the internet (kind of like the Ishtar thing), or an example of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
TL;DR version – Maya calendars accounted for the leap year, from the start. If they hadn’t, they would not have accurately calculated the solstices. There never was any 2012 prophecy to start with.
- – (a baktun is a very long cycle in the calendar, about 394 of our years)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_calendar[/quote]
Good post. I will admit that, though I pride myself on my skepticism, and typically start ANYTHING I read on facebook et al. from the position of DIS-belief; because it confirmed my previously held biases, I actually did let myself believe the meme that the leap year issue disproved the Mayan doomsday prediction. This is the first time I have recognized that the Mayans might have already had the leap years calculated into their own calendars, and not been working off of our system.
Thanks for teaching me something and for the little dose of humility that I think all of us periodically need, particularly in these narcissistic times.