Painted ancient Maya numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 (w/ Video)

A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets.
Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xult煤n in Guatemala鈥檚 Pet茅n region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town鈥檚 scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings 鈥 one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms 鈥 and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar.
One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya 鈥 the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, reports archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation.
鈥淔or the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community,鈥 Saturno said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like an episode of TV鈥檚 鈥楤ig Bang Theory,鈥 a geek math problem and they鈥檙e painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard.鈥
The discovery is reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science.
The project scientists say that despite popular belief, there is no sign that the Maya calendar 鈥 or the world 鈥 was to end in the year 2012, just one of its calendar cycles. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000,鈥 said Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, a coauthor of the Science paper. 鈥淭he car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over; the Maya just start over.鈥
The mural represents the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house. 鈥淭here are tiny glyphs all over the wall, bars and dots representing columns of numbers. It鈥檚 the kind of thing that only appears in one place 鈥 the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later. We鈥檝e never seen anything like it,鈥 said David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, who deciphered the glyphs.
The vegetation-covered structure was first spotted in 2010 by Saturno鈥檚 student Max Chamberlain, who was following looters鈥 trenches to explore the site of Xult煤n, hidden in the remote rain forest of the Pet茅n. Then, supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, Saturno and his team launched an organized exploration and excavation of the house, working urgently to beat the region鈥檚 rainy seasons, which threatened to erase what time had so far preserved.
Xult煤n, 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 鈥淴ult煤n鈥 鈥 鈥渆nd stone.鈥 Scientists from Harvard University mapped more of the site in the 1970s. The house discovered by Saturno鈥檚 team was numbered 54 of 56 structures counted and mapped at that time. Thousands at Xult煤n remain uncounted.
The team鈥檚 excavations reveal that monumental construction at Xult煤n began in the first centuries B.C. The site thrived until the end of the Classic Maya period; the site鈥檚 last carved monument dates to around 890 A.D. Xult煤n stood only about five miles from San Bartolo, where in 2001 Saturno found rare, extensive murals painted on the walls of a ritual structure by the ancient Maya.
鈥淚t鈥檚 weird that the Xult煤n finds exist at all,鈥 Saturno said. 鈥淪uch writings and artwork on walls don鈥檛 preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a meter below the surface.鈥
The Writing on the Walls
The house contains three intact walls, each telling its own story to researchers 鈥 and posing its own mysteries:
The north wall lies straight ahead as one enters the room. An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king鈥檚 portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him 鈥淵ounger Brother Obsidian,鈥 a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. 鈥淭he portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,鈥 Saturno said.
Four long numbers on the wall representing one-third of a million to 2.5 million days likely bring together all of the astronomical cycles 鈥 such as those of Mars, Venus and the lunar eclipses 鈥 that the Maya thought important, dates that stretch some 7,000 years into the future. This is the first place Maya archaeologists have found that seems to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Another number scratched into the plaster surface likely records the date 鈥 813 A.D., a time when the Maya world had begun to collapse.
The west wall: Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. 鈥淲e haven鈥檛 seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before,鈥 Saturno said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 clearly a costume of some kind.鈥 One of the figures is particularly burly, 鈥渓ike a sumo wrestler,鈥 and he is labeled 鈥淥lder Brother Obsidian.鈥 Another is labeled as a youth.
The east wall: Although badly eroded, another black-painted human figure and remnants of others can be seen. But the wall is dominated by numerical figures, including columns of numbers representing counting and calendrical calculations. Some of the numbers track the phases of the moon; others try to reconcile lunar periods with the solar calendar. 鈥淪kywatching like this was a tool for predicting eclipses,鈥 Saturno said. One well-preserved section contains numerical notes painted in red that appear to be corrections to more formal calculations appearing alongside them.
鈥淭he most exciting point is that we now see that the Maya were making such computations hundreds of years 鈥 and in places other than books 鈥 before they recorded them in the Codices,鈥 Aveni said.
The scientists say the symbols reflect a certain world view. 鈥淭he ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this,鈥 Saturno said. 鈥淲e keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It鈥檚 an entirely different mindset.鈥
More information: "Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala," by W.A. Saturno; F. Rossi at Boston University in Boston, MA; D. Stuart at University of Texas, Austin in Austin, TX; A.F. Aveni at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY.
Provided by National Geographic Society