Yeah it always marvels me how modern people put so much stock in primitive people. "They were good at math!" they also sacrificed people to their gods "but if we ignore that, then this fits!"

People will always assign any values they see to predictions from the past. While ignoring the completely wrong ones.

Reminds me of the saying, even a broken clock is right 2 times a day (at least a non-digital one).

Reminds me I need to do a write up for a cult that I read about in a (fiction) book. Like. Mages that make toxic blood mages look like sleeping kittens.

And no, it wouldn't require any thing that's not already in ShadowRun to do.

The most negative 'in between time' was the 5 days at the end of the yearly calendar. 18 'months' of 20 days and a 5 day month to bring things close to the 365 1/4 day year. Those 5 days were seen as unlucky. Some moderns joke about Mayan mothers crossing their legs during those days to keep from giving inauspicious birth. Babies born then were not habitually put to death, but it is possible they were seen as destined for misery and perhaps would be better off helping the gods keep the world going.

Actually, they were good at maths. One example: the invention of the number zero radically magnified the scope and power of mathematical calculations, and it was invented independently twice, in India and among the ancient Maya. They also made great strides in agriculture, art, social organization, architecture, astronomy and many other fields of human endeavour. There were Einsteins and Sun Tsus and Rembrandts among them, too. Some moderns label them 'primitive' because they didn't have cars, Reeboks and McDonald's. I question that view.

Their religion included human sacrifice, because in their world view the Gods who had given of their own life force required blood to replenish their energy. Without that, the world would end. We 'advanced, modern people' don't sacrifice humans to our gods. We just sacrifice our God and consume his body and blood every Sunday. Oh... well, except for our interminable crusades over 'my God is better than your God'.

The trouble matching the two calendars, Maya and Gregorian, stems mostly not from errors in the Mayan calendar. There were issues such as irregularities introduced into carved dates for political purposes, but their system predicted things like astronomical events such as solar and lunar eclipses. Also the full long-count calendar was out of use in most places by the time the Spanish showed up, so we can't know for many particular dates, in which 256 year segment they happened. The main problem comes from the fact that 99%+ of Mayan documents were destroyed by the Spanish in their 'my God is better than your God' zeal, and so we don't have enough information about events and their dates that can be matched to our own calendar. So there is a lot that is open to interpretation, and different academic factions follow different interpretations. Sound familiar?

The 'end of the world' hysteria among us moderns comes from a mis-/re-interpretation (It's not RAW!) of the ancient Mesoamerican cyclical view of time. The linear, long-count calendar which we try to match to our own was used to measure time both forwards and backwards for millions of years. Along side that calendar were cycles of 260 days, 365 days, 584 days (related to the cycle of Venus, off by a fraction which they knew about and for which they corrected) and more. The concept of constant ending and renewal was ingrained in Maya thinking. They also believed that there had been other worlds before theirs, each born, shaped and then destroyed in a unique way. It's not clear whether the ancient Maya saw the roughly 5128 year Great Cycle measured in the long-count system as the length of the life of a world. Modern maya mystics argue that it was not meant to do so. Modern Maya mystics may not want us to think a) the real end of the world is coming or b) the mystics themselves are 'primitive' people.

EDIT: Sorry, it was the Aztecs who had different versions of the end of the world. Each of the Maya worlds ended in a deluge.

Ancient texts aren't always translated properly. Many, the Bible, the Qur'an, and the Mayan calendar included, are often interpreted by a few charismatic and/or influential individuals to meet their own agendas with the resulting flames fanned by the masses who feel they need to make their lives mean something.

Then of course, if the world is gonna end because the *insert name* calendar is about to end, then this world should've ended thousands of times over from the Gregorian and Julian calendars alone.

And IIRC the Mayan calendar had five grand cycles to the whole thing, with the end of the fifth coming up. Initially makes me wonder why a culture would put themselves near the end of a calendar of their own creation, until you add in an interstellar wobble of our sun and its position in the galaxy that pretty much lines up with five grand cycles. Funny that, eh?

Actually, we're nearing the end of the 13th b'ak'tun. Almost none of the Mayan counts use a base of 5; primarily they use 20s.

(Oh, and just for reference, there is a date they marked as 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0 the one in italics is the b'ak'tun)

It's the Aztecs who have us in the Fifth World. The Maya, best that we can tell from modern Maya mythology (again, because of the destroyed Maya documents), puts us in the Fourth World.

also there's the element of mistransation that comes into the ancient stories that happened before it gets to modern en. look at Atlantis. Probably, RL, the Minoans with an advanced culture but after the Greeks got their story tellers into it they became larger than life with alien science and people lookin in the freaking Atlantic for it.

Similarly look at the myth we today have that has grown up, because of the Greeks over the name Megidio. This is a place in modern Isreal at the end of the Musmus Pass. The passis a tight spot in the region and holding that gives you command of the open plains on either side. About 2,000 years ago it was known to be bandit infested, men looking to cut off trade by camel caravan. It was so tight that it was caled 'the eye of the needle' and a place so dangerous that a certain well known Rabbi said it was easier for a rich men to enter the kingdom of god than a camel could get through the eye of the needle.

More than a 1,000 years before that, it entered myth as the spot where Pharoh Thutmosis III in 1469 BC defeated the canaanites and with Egypt pushing north became the dominante power in the world. . In 1918 the British General Allenby broke the Ottoman empire when his troops reached the end of the pass and with a sense of history named his battle Megidio. But that name is lost on most people. The blame for the growth of the legend, like Atantis falls to the Greeks and their legend spinners. Local legend on the name grew since the days of the Pharohs until it went from a fmaous battlefield to a place where empires fall and the world as you knew ended. But the name 'Megidio' was too barbaric for the Greek ear so the name was helenized by them to something that sounded Greek.
Megidio, the battle field, became the place the world ends- Armegeddon.

As with anything and everything, it pays to be skeptical. Anyone know anything about the Violet and Indigo children that are supposed to correlate with this? Or am I simply off and groggy from just waking up?

I didn't say they weren't good at maths. I'm saying that being good at maths doesn't make your culture the ultra enlightened be-all end-all, especially when it comes to something as crazy insane as predicting apocalypse (or whatever) thousands of years ahead of time. And that humans tend to ignore the things that don't fit their theories, and pay attention only to the things that do. So the Mayans calculated some dates and had religious ceremonies/celebrations on those dates, yipee. But if I'm trying to start an end of days cult, or join the millions of people trying to make money off the 2012 hype, then I'm going to take the dates but either ignore the religious festivities that come with them, or twist them in a way that suits my purpose.

And no, not all of us sacrifice our god and consume his SYMBOLIC body every Sunday. At the risk of starting a flame war, modern belief in religious superstitions and mythology is as "primitive" as ancient ones. It's about the powerful few trying to maintain their stranglehold over the masses by any means necessary, including mass hysteria. Heck most people who claim to be of a judeo-christian denomination have never actually read their holy book. And I'd file the crusades, and the people involved, under primitive as well.

Exactly.

Which further underlines my opinion about it all being bullshit.
Actually Plato says quite plainly in Timeus that Atlantis is a hypothetical city. A thought experiment that never actually existed. It wasn't taken seriously in antiquity for that very reason. The Atlantis people are always harping over today is a modern invention made to sell books/films/cultist dogma.

Could it have been based on Minoan Crete? Probably, but it was by no means a misinterpretation.

Never heard of Violet children, but Indigo I have heard of. Supposed to be super intelligent, empathic children, supposedly psychic etc. who will lead us to a better world yatta yatta. More new age hippie bullshit to sell books.

One of the major Indigo authors published a list of like 50 symptoms of being an Indigo online a couple years back. I checked positive for EVERY. LAST. ONE. Am I an Indigo? No. I just had some decent genes and parents who gave enough of a shit about me to pay attention to me as I grew up.

All hype trying to make money and kids trying to beg for attention they don't get at home while dealing with the changes of puberty.

No, you didn't. Whoever you were quoting did, and I was just carrying on from there.

Rayzorblades, you and I each have our own bugbears that get us going. Being an archaeologist, one of mine is that some modern-day people look down on ancient people, either as being dumber, or 'primitive' (yeah, the word got me going, don't worry about it) simply because they didn't have the technology we do today, or as 'noble savages' who lived in a golden age long gone, but worth reviving. Both of these are ethnocentric views and give little credit to the efforts and genius of ancient people.

As has been said by wiser ones than I, we reach so high because we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us. It took hard science and brilliance to figure out the number zero or chart the movements of the stars and planets, and it took hard-nosed politics to turn that knowledge into a social machine that fed on the blood of enemies and fellow citizens alike. Those ancient Maya were deliciously complex, and an awful lot of fun to study.

On that note, I seem to remember something about the Great Piramid being larger (in volume) than the next like 50 largest buildings added together. There's enough stone in it to build a 10-foot high wall around Texas.

Ancient man wasn't dumb or primitive, they were just suffering from Gilligan's Island Syndrome. Imagine what daVinci could do with access to today's technology.

"The volume [of the great pyramid], including an internal hillock, is roughly 2,500,000 cubic meters."

Sears Tower is (roughly; based on its height, floor count, and floor area*) 1,549,497 cubic meters.

*Height: 1451 feet to the roof. 108 floors. Makes 13.4 feet per floor, round down to 12 for variance in floor area per height of the building.
4.56 million sq ft of floor space, times 12 feet of volume per floor is 54,720,000 cu. ft., convert to cubic meters.

Hrmm.. Maybe the statistic I saw was really, really outdated.

Of course, most of the volume of the Sears Tower is air space. Not so the pyramid, which is a honking big pile of rock.

In the Andes Mountains of northern Peru lived a people called the Chachapoyas, who were conquered with difficulty by the Incas. Their largest fortress, Kuelap, sits on a mountain ridge and is about 3/4 of a kilometer long and 100 to 200 meters wide. Along one long side, the retaining wall that holds the platform on which the settlement inside rested is roughly 20 meters high. The depth of the wall escapes me at the moment, but it has been estimated that the amount of stone in the wall is equal to three great pyramids.

Folks back then were into moving some serious stone.

This is true, and its still an amazing feat.

I just want to know what methods they were using to move that much stone. I don't care what level of technology you are using. That's a lot of gross tonnage & mass. It simply doesn't move that easily.

Maybe...?

Beat me to it Draco.