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Earliest Mayan Calendar Found

By Stephanie Pappas

Credit: Heather Hurst, copyright National Geographic Society

A Maya king, seated and wearing an elaborate head dress of blue feathers, adorns the north wall of the ruined house discovered at the Maya site of Xultún. An attendant, at right, leans out from behind the king’s head dress. The painting by artist Heather Hurst recreates the design and colors of the original Maya artwork at the site. The excavation and preservation of the site were supported by the National Geographic Society.

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    Conservator Angelyn Bass cleans and stabilizes the surface of a wall of a Maya house that dates to the ninth century. The figure of a man who may have been the town scribe appears on the wall to her left.

    (Photot by Tyrone Turner © 2012 National Geographic)

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May 10, 2012 Updated May 10, 2012 at 4:44 PM PDT

(LiveScience) The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

"The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around."

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