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2012

1 - 1011 - 16
Time Zone: EST (New York, Toronto)
Messenger: Ark I Sent: 5/10/2012 7:04:40 PM
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I just read an article about a Mayan calendar that was found that projected dates 4,000 years from now.


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Oldest known Maya calendar found in Guatemala

(The artwork at the Xultun site is unusually well preserved, archaeologists say, and one calendar projects 4,000 years beyond now.)




In the remote northeastern corner of Guatemala, archaeologists have found what appears to be the 9th century workplace of a city scribe, an unusual dwelling adorned with magnificent pictures of the king and other royals and the oldest known Maya calendar.

This year has been particularly controversial among some cultists because of the belief that the Maya calendar predicts a major cataclysm — perhaps the end of the world — on Dec. 21, 2012. Archaeologists know that is not true, but the new find, written on the plaster equivalent of a modern scientist's whiteboard, strongly reinforces the idea that the Maya calendar projects thousands of years into the future.

The astronomical calculations are similar to those found in the well-known Dresden Codex, a bark-paper Maya book from the 11th or 12th century, and they may yield insights on how that well-known work was prepared.

But scientists say the real value of the find is the rare appearance of paintings and numerical calculations. The building, dating from about AD 813 in what is known as the Classic Maya period, contains the oldest known Maya astronomical tables and the only preserved artwork not found in a palace.

The discoveries, made in a region of lowland rain forest, are unusual because artwork and writings from the area are easily destroyed by heat and rain.

"The state of preservation was remarkable," said archaeologist William A. Saturno of Boston University, who led the expedition.

"We've never seen anything like it," added archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, who is deciphering the hieroglyphs.

The artwork and writings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science and in the May 29 issue of National Geographic magazine.

The discovery was made at a site called Xultun, which was discovered in 1915 but not thoroughly studied until recently because of its isolation. One of Saturno's students, Maxwell Chamberlain, was on a lunch break in 2010 when he spied what appeared to be very faint paint on a stone in a looter's trench.

When Saturno dug farther into the room opened by the trench, he said he was shocked to find a mural of a king sitting on a throne holding a white scepter and wearing a red-feathered crown with a headdress streaming away from him. A courtier or servant peeks out from behind him.

The archaeologists immediately preserved the site and came back the next year to excavate it. The 40-square-foot room had been filled with rubble before other structures were built on top of it. That was an unusual practice for the Maya, who typically collapsed roofs and walls before rebuilding, and had done so to other rooms around the site. But it led to the preservation.

The portrait of the king was found in a rounded niche on the north wall of the structure. Bone curtain rods would have allowed a drape to be drawn across it to hide it.

On the wall next to it is the portrait of a figure in brilliant orange, with jade bracelets, holding a stylus. The figure, who may have been a scribe, was labeled "younger brother obsidian" or perhaps "junior obsidian." He may have been the king's son or brother, the team said.

A mural on the west wall shows three identically dressed individuals, painted in black. Each wears a simple loincloth, a white medallion and a large black headdress with a single red feather. No such grouping of identical headdresses had been seen before. The largest figure in the group is labeled "older brother obsidian," or perhaps "senior obsidian."

On the east wall are rough sketches of people and several different areas with columns of numbers and calculations, either written with red and black paint or inscribed in plaster. Several areas appear to have been plastered over several times, as if to provide fresh writing surfaces.

Not all of the writing has been deciphered yet, but some clearly describe the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. Another calendar nearby comprises 17 baktuns, or 400-year periods, encompassing an additional 4,000 years beyond the 21st century.

"This is our first real look at this kind of writing and this kind of a space in a Maya city," Saturno said.

Stuart acknowledged that "we don't know exactly what this is noting," but the Maya were looking at "patterns in the sky and intermeshing them mathematically."

Among other things, the calculations showed which god was the patron of each day and month, marked celestial events tied to religious ceremonies and allowed astronomers to calculate the dates of eclipses, which were important in rituals.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-ancient-mayan-calendar-20120511,0,597949.story

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Messenger: Ark I Sent: 5/11/2012 9:56:05 AM
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Here is another article

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In the last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house, a new study says—and it's not just any mural.


In addition to a still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue, the walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time. Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the markings suggest dates thousands of years in the future.


Perhaps most important, the otherwise humble chamber offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Maya society. (Video: "Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered.")

"The paintings we have here—we've never found them anyplace else," excavation leader William Saturno told National Geographic News.

And in today's Xultún—to the untrained eye, just 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it's a wonder Saturno's team found the artwork at all.

At the Guatemalan site in 2010 the Boston University archaeologist and Ph.D. student Franco Rossi were inspecting a looters' tunnel, where an undergraduate student had noticed the faintest traces of paint on a thin stucco wall.

The pair began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.

"Suddenly Bill was like, 'Oh my God, we have a glyph!'" Rossi said.

What the team found, after a full excavation in 2011, is likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún.

"The reason this room's so interesting," said Rossi, as he crouched in the chamber late last year, "is that ... this was a workspace. People were seated on this bench" painting books that have long since disintegrated.

The books would have been filled with elaborate calculations intended to predict the city's fortunes. The numbers on the wall were "fixed tabulations that they can then refer to—tables more or less like those in the back of your chemistry book," he added.

"Undoubtedly this type of room exists at every Maya site in the Late Classic [period] and probably earlier, but it's our only example thus far."

Maya Twilight

Its facade long ago erased by erosion and creeping plant life, the scribe's chamber was once part of a small building just off a massive Maya plaza circled by pyramids, where kings and high priests conducted ceremonies and peddlers likely sold the clay pots whose fragments now litter the forest site.

Discovered in 1915, the sprawling city was just five miles (eight kilometers) from another Maya metropolis, San Bartolo, which became famous when Saturno uncovered stunning, 2,000-year-old Maya murals there about a decade ago.

Beyond the two cities, the Maya civilization spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region. Around A.D. 900 the Classic Maya centers, including Xultún, collapsed after a series of droughts and perhaps political conflicts. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

The apparent desperation of those final years may have played out on the walls of the newly revealed room—the only major excavation so far in Xultún.

A "Different Mindset," Etched in Ancient Stucco

Despite past looting, the interior of the newfound room is nearly perfectly preserved.

Among the artworks on the three intact walls is a detailed orange painting of a man wearing white disks on his head and chest—likely the scribe himself, said Saturno, who received funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration and Expeditions Council. (National Geographic News is a division of the Society.)

Holding a paintbrush, the scribe is reaching out to the blue-feather-bedecked king, whose elaborate likeness was hidden behind a curtain attached to the wall by human bone, according to the study, published this week in the journal Science.

But what was really interesting was what the team found next.

Working with epigrapher David Stuart and archaeologist and artist Heather Hurst, the researchers noticed several barely visible hieroglyphic texts, painted and etched along the east and north walls of the room.

One is a lunar table, and the other is a "ring number"—something previously known only from much later Maya books, where it was used as part of a backward calculation in establishing a base date for planetary cycles. Nearby is a sequence of numbered intervals corresponding to key calendrical and planetary cycles.

The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future, adding to evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012—a modern myth inspired by an ancient calendar that depicts time starting over this year. (Related pictures: "2012 Doomsday Myths Debunked.")

"We keep looking for endings," expedition leader Saturno said in a statement. "The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."

Though the idea of cyclical time is nothing new in Maya studies, team member Rossi added, the Xultún mural is by far the earliest known expression of the concept.

For example, he said while pointing to the ring number, "this is something we don't see again for over 500 years."

(See "2012 Prophecies Sparking Real Fears, Suicide Warnings.")

Now Is the Time

The Maya at Xultún were likely less concerned with the end of the world than the end of their world, according to Mayan-writing expert David Freidel of Washington University in St. Louis.

For ninth-century Maya, tabulating astronomical calendars to predict times of plenty was akin to gauging the stock market today, said Freidel, who wasn't involved in the new study.

When the Mural was made, the Xultún region was facing "a period of intense drought. In fact, cities were collapsing in various parts of the Maya world in this era," he said.

"The preoccupation of this king and his courtiers with astronomical calculation is not an arcane exercise. It has a very practical consequence for the people of the city of Xultún, which is, What the hell is going on with the economy?"

Xultún Discovery "Pretty Wild"

During tough times, the Maya looked to their leaders to divine the intents of the gods and appease them.

In turn, those rulers may have looked to the scribes, who many archaeologists believe used past events—in combination with mysterious, complex arithmetic—to predict the future.

As such, the newfound workroom could hold secrets into how the long-forgotten political system operated.

But for the scientists, the mural is also about the joy of discovery.

"To be uncovering glyphs and reading them right off the wall—to be the first one in 1,200 years to read something? I mean, it's pretty wild," Rossi said.

Sadly, we may never understand the full context of the workroom. Many of the glyphs are badly faded. Worse, the entire city of Xultún was looted clean during the 70s, leaving very little other writing or antiquities.

Because of this, and despite Xultún's obvious prominence in the Maya world, many archaeologists had written off the site.

"And yet we've still found things here that we've never seen anyplace else," excavation leader Saturno said. "And we only started looking three years ago."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/05/120510-maya-2012-doomsday-calendar-end-of-world-science/
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Messenger: bredren aaron Sent: 5/12/2012 8:22:08 AM
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The red headress is also worn by native american chiefs and the single red feather is worn by his son's. The Mayans have lived through changes in the earth's cycles before and their way of life was based on the stars and planets. Dec 2012 the sun ,earth and the rift in the milkyway will be in alignment during the winter solstice and the Mayans new this from studying the constellations. The solar flares from the sun are supposed to be at their highest on that day and that tends to knock out communication systems. As Ark I said they had to end their calender at some point and since this happens once every 25 thousand years it makes sense to stop and start new for coming seasons on that day.


Messenger: Eleazar Sent: 5/15/2012 10:18:06 AM
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The Mayans must have had a very advanced calendar system to predict events thousands of years into the future.

Milankovitch cycles can also help to explain what conditions on Earth might be like in the future.

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In 1920, Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian astronomer and geophysicist, came up with an explanation to the question of why glaciers advance and retreat periodically during an ice age. Milankovitch studied how the Earth’s orbit changes shape and how its axis changes orientation through time, and he calculated the frequency of these changes. In particular, he evaluated three aspects of Earth’s movement around the Sun.

• Orbital eccentricity: Milankovitch showed that the Earth’s orbit gradually changes from a more circular shape to a more elliptical shape. This eccentricity cycle takes around 100,000 years
• Tilt of Earth’s axis: We have seasons because the Earth’s axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. Milankovitch calculated that over time, the tilt angle varies between 22.5° and 24.5°, with a frequency of 41,000 years
• Procession of Earth’s axis: If you’ve ever set a top spinning, you’ve probably noticed that its axis gradually traces a conical path. This motion, or wobble, is called precession. Milankovitch determined that the Earth’s axis wobbles over the course of about 23,000 years. Right now, the Earth’s axis points toward Polaris, making it the north star, but 12,000 years ago the axis pointed to Vega. Precession determines the relationship between the timing of the seasons and the position of Earth along its orbit around the Sun. If summer happens when Earth is closer to the Sun, then we have a warm summer, but if it happens when Earth is farther away from the Sun, then we have a cool summer.

Milankovitch showed that precession, along with variations in orbital eccentricity and tilt, combine to affect the total annual amount of insolation (exposure to the Sun’s rays) and the seasonal distribution of insolation that the Earth receives at the high latitudes (such as 65°N). For example, high latitude regions receive more insolation when the Earth’s axis is almost perpendicular to its orbital plane than when its axis is greatly tilted. According to Milankovitch, glaciers tend to advance during times of cool summers at 65° N, which occurs roughly 100,000, 40,000, and 20,000 years apart. When geologists began to study the climate record, they found climate cycles with the frequency predicted by Milankovitch. These climate cycles are now called Milankovitch cycles.
The discovery of Milankovitch cycles in the geologic record strongly supports the contention that changes in the Earth’s orbit and tilt help trigger short-term advances and retreats during an ice age. But orbit and tilt changes cannot be the whole story, because they could cause only about a 4°C temperature decrease (relative to today’s temperature), and during glaciations the temperature decreased 5° to 7°C along coasts and 10° to 13°C inland. Geologists suggest that several other factors may come into play in order to trigger a glacial advance.

• A changing albedo: When snow remains on land throughout the year, or clouds form in the sky, the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth increases, so Earth’s surface reflects incoming sunlight and thus becomes even cooler.



• Interrupting the global heat conveyor: As the climate cools, evaporation rates from the sea decrease, so seawater does not become as salty. And decreasing salinity might stop the system of thermohaline currents that brings warm water to high latitudes. Thus, the high latitudes become even colder than they would otherwise

• Biological processes that change CO2 concentration: Several kinds of biological processes may have amplified climate changes by altering the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For example, a greater amount of plankton growing in the oceans could absorb more carbon dioxide and thus remove it from the atmosphere

The three processes described above are called positive-feedback mechanisms : they enhance the process that causes them. Because of positive feedback, the Earth could cool more than it would otherwise during the cooler stage of a Milankovitch cycle, and this could trigger a glacial advance.
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Milankovitch cycle





Messenger: SuperSmile Sent: 7/16/2012 4:19:40 PM
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What are your views on the Ancient Sumerians and their sayings of planet X aka Nibiru


Messenger: Eleazar Sent: 7/16/2012 9:11:31 PM
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I don't know much about the prophecies of the Ancient Sumerians and the planet nibiru. I've heard some neo-pagans talk about how they think their sumerian god enki is coming back, but I don't really care much about that. The sumerians were the forerunners of the babylonians, and I and I nah bow to the gods of babylon.

One God, One Jah, RasTafarI.

I think 2012 will come and go the same as any other year.


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