MessageToEagle.com - The oldest ever Mayan calendar has been unearthed by archaeologists at the Xultun ruins in Guatemala.

Today, the whole world's attention focuses on a small, about 1,200-year-old room in Guatemala' s ancient ruins, where royal scribes covered its walls with astronomical records, hundreds of scrawled numbers and the society's complex calendar.

Additionally the walls of the room are covered with totally unique paintings, like for example one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms.

We've never seen anything like it," said David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, who deciphered the glyphs.

However, according to experts, there is absolutely no prediction of the coming doomsday.

Additionally, the calculations include a time span longer than 6000 years that could extend well beyond 2012.

The astronomical cycles and corrections were used to predict lunar eclipses far into the future

"Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?" observed Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in New York, an expert on Mayan astronomy.
"You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on."

The room is part of a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala. The walls also contain portraits of a seated king and some other figures, but it's clear those have no connection to the astronomical writings, the scientists said.

One wall contains a calendar based on phases of the moon, covering about 13 years. The researchers said they think it might have been used to keep track of which deity was overseeing the moon at particular times.

Inside a structure excavated at the ancient Maya city of Xultun, researchers found walls bearing astronomical tables and paintings of big-wigs such as these. Credit: Tyrone Turner, copyright 2012 National Geographic

Aveni said it would allow scribes to predict the appearance of a full moon years in advance, for example. Such record-keeping was key to Mayan astrology and rituals, and maybe would be used to advise the king on when to go to war or how good this year's crops would be, he said.

"What you have here is astronomy driven by religion," he said.

On an adjacent wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6700 years. It's not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.

"It's weird that the Xultún finds exist at all," William Saturno commented.

"Such writings and artwork on walls don't preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a meter below the surface."

Heather Hurst, an archaeologist, project illustrator and assistant professor of anthropology at Skidmore College, on site at Maya ruins in Guatemala. Excavations by archeologist William Saturno uncovered Maya murals in mounds that are thought to be residences dating from around 800 AD. The site is called "Xultun" and is located near Tikal in the province of Peten in northeastern Guatemala. Photo by Tyrone Turner © 2012 National Geographic

"It's really a wonderful surprise," said Simon Martin, co-curator of an exhibit about the Mayan calendar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. While the results of the scribes' work were known from carvings on monuments, "we've never really been able to identify a working space, or how they actually went about things," Martin said.

The new work gives insight into that, he said, and the fact the room had a stone roof rather than thatching supports previous indications that the scribes enjoyed a high social standing. "It's a very important discovery. We're only getting a glimpse of it" in the published paper, said John B Carlson, director of the Center for Archaeoastronomy in the US.

The discovery seems to be of great importance and this is only the beginning of archaeological discoveries in the area.

The site of Xultún, hidden in the remote rain forest of the Petén and covered with vegetation, was first spotted by archaeologists in 2010. Xultún, a 12-square-mile site where tens of thousands once lived, was first discovered about 100 years ago by a Guatemalan worker and roughly mapped in the 1920s by Sylvanus Morley, who named the site "Xultún" -- "end stone."

Scientists from Harvard University mapped more of the site in the 1970s. The house discovered by Saturno's team was numbered 54 of 56 structures counted and mapped at that time. Thousands at Xultún remain uncounted.

The Xultun find is the first place that all of the cycles have been found tied mathematically together in one place, representing a calendar that stretches more than 7,000 years into the future.

Anthony Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston University and others, report the discovery in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

@ MessageToEagle.com

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