In what is considered to be one of the most significant hieroglyphic discoveries in decades, archaeologists in Guatemala, announced the uncovering of panels reportedly showing the second-known reference to the Mayan 2012 "end date."
The 1,300 year-old panels uncovered in Guatemala City, Guatemala, featured inscriptions showing a military victory visit to the city La Corona by the ruler of the Mayan city of Calakmul, Reuters reports.
"I was very amazed and amused yesterday to notice that that panel records the date of the end of the 13th baktun (20 cycles of the Mayan long count calendar), which for us is coming up in just a few months time in December of 2012," Dr. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin told Reuters.
"Here we have a Mayan monument that was carved 1,500 years ago that's talking about the year we're in right now," he said.
The inscriptions also predict that the ruler’s lineage will continue, the report said.
The Mayan calendar count begins in 3,114 BC and is divided into approximately 394-year periods. Mayans held the 13 sacred, and the13th period ends on December 21, 2012.
"When we take into account how the monument originally was, we can see that it's the largest concentration of inscriptions in the country, and one of the three or five most important in the Mayan world,” Thomas Barrientos, director of the Centre of Anthropological and Archaeological Investigations at the Univsidad del Valle, told Reuters.
A May poll says that nearly 10 percent of people believe that the year 2012 on the Mayan calendar signifies an apocalyptic collapse.
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