Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm very Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and chocolate boarding. And I think one thing proven throughout history is that people really love a good doomsday propaty, don't they. It's so true. Just last year, we had a lot of news about the May one potential doomsday. I remember seeing billboards and news articles about it. It was kind of a kind of a story for a while. See I must have been living underground or because I remember I was in Italy at the time and the friends I was traveling with they mentioned that that was going on, and just sort of like, oh, yeah, this is going to happen maybe away. And I remember we were debating over like, well, how will we know what the time change when it's happening, because you know, when you're in a vacation, you don't even know what day. It as a lot of time. I know, I was at a friend's wedding and I remember her saying like, well, hey, you know, at least I'm throwing a big party with all my friends and family, so attitude. Yeah it is. But today we're gonna be looking both to the past and the future, and we're going to revisit an episode recorded in two thousand and eight by former podcast host Candice and Jane, and they discuss what's perhaps the most famous doomsday possibility out there at least these days, probably because it's still to come December twenty one, twelve, and that date is of course based on the so called mind calendar, really the Long Count calendar, and the fact that will be at least coming to the end of a great cycle that started back in BC. Many other doomsday prophecies have also been connected to great calendar changes like the Long Count, or otherwise around dates. Probably all but our youngest listeners remember y two k in which people feared not so much a great apocalypse but an electronic one still enough to hoard the water. Yeah, I mean it was scary to a lot of people. But at other points in history the predictions have also been date based, but for the sake of the date symbolic significance rather than just its roundness, like the year two thousands. So, for instance, many people in England feared the year sixteen sixty six because of that inauspicious series of numbers and the world of course didn't end, but a plague did strike the year before, and of course the Great London Fire, the Great Fire of London, I should say, occurred in sixteen sixty six, something we mentioned in our Famous Fires episode and really might have served to make people feel like potentially the world was coming to an end. Cosmic events sometimes also trigger doomsday prophecies, according to National Geographic For example, the nineteen ten appearance of Hayley's comment had folks scrambling for so called comic pills and oxygen supplies, which both were supposed to protect you from the comments tales noxious gases. Yeah, and in n the appearance of the hill pop comment um drove members of Heaven's Gate to commit suicide, expecting aliens following the comment to come rescue them. So, you know, I think this gives a pretty fair representation of all of the different kinds of reasons why people expect the apocalypse. And this was just a very small number of things we could have mentioned. But even the twelve event does have of cosmic element to it, It does have a year kind of significance to it, and we're gonna look into a little bit more about that in Candis and Jane's episode, So let's take a listen. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff sider Jane McGrath. Hey, they're Candice Jane. Did you take time the other day to watch all of the inauguration ceremonies and television footage? Know what? I was so busy eating at a chance, But I've been watching on YouTube and all like that. Okay, so you follow it up on all the stories of fashion, the speeches, the bloopers, etcetera. Of course, it was really fun in the house Stuff Works office because a couple of us dropped our work and we went into the common room and we watched the ceremony on TV, and it was it was really special, and not just because the Obama girls looked adorable and they're brightly colored clothes. Um, and because Rick Warren pronounced their names so fancifully. I have I have to quote him. Malia and Sasha. We really couldn't get enough. We've been saying around the office ever since then. But it was just really great to be in a room with intelligent people watching such a historic event. And I was thinking how utterly incredibly tragically sad that it is the last inauguration we will ever see because the world will end in Oh my goodness. I know Jane's a little bit on edge. I don't necessarily ascribe to that belief. I was trying to get everybody worked up excited for our podcast today, which is about the Mind Calendar. And if you are at all familiar with the Mayan Calendar, you may know that there's a prophecy that the world will end on December twenty one, twelve. That's true, and some people are a little on edge about this idea, although it doesn't have that much uh history in terms of the Mayan Calendar, in terms of what the mind is actually believed, which is interesting, right. I think a lot of the fuss can be attributed to doomsday speakers, and we actually got away popular. Yeah, well, because they're fun to hear about and they're fun to think about. The end of the world is always the end of the world. We actually got a listener email about the Mayan Calendar, and I'm not quite sure if our friend Molina is a a doomsday believer or if she just wanted to hear more of the story behind it. But she write to us, Hi, I'd like to know what the Mayans really say about this twelve end of days. I have heard many interpretations, most of which I think you're geared at selling books Smart Girl and Doomsday Gear. I'd like to know how accurate were their prediction sends and why this calendar was so important to them. So, Molina, here's the answer, and we will start by cracking the code behind the Mind Calendar. And to understand this week, we have to get a little context about the Lion civilization in general. I guess just to let you know, the Mayans, the whole empire was incredibly sophisticated. Uh. They existed around parts of what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, els Avaldoor, and parts of southern Mexico as well, and they were a very sophisticated culture. They actually started reading. They were one of the first meso Americans, the people in that Central American area to start writing at all in the pre Classic period, which went up to from between about two thousand BC and three. And you can actually divide the Mind civilization into three distinct periods. The format ever pre Classic, which Jane just mentioned, then the Classic followed in that reign from about three hundred until nine hundred and the post Classic from nine hundred to four hundred, and around that time we see the Mayan civilization sort of reaching out a bitter end when the Spanish Inquisition comes in and starts phasing the culture out. This true, and spellers are a bit baffled by what happened at the end of the Classic period is interesting. They were incredibly sophisticated, but there was a time about nine a d. Where they reached a sharp decline in their civilization. They left cities and temples abandoned. It was very odd, and scholars disagree about what caused this, whether it was exhausting the food supply or the rewards among people and do right Candice. The Spanish arrived and about the fourteen hundreds, like fourteen hundreds, and that sort of ended the period of the mind Empire in general. And we know a lot about mine history because these were people who left written records. They had a system of hieroglyphics that they used for recording myths and history and other governmental decrees things like this. They actually had sort of like a primitive type of book and paper that were bound together as well as stuli, which were large free standing stone monuments almost like an obelisk really, that they would carve things into. And in addition to hieroglyphics, they also had a logo, graphics and a phonetic syllabic sort of alphabets. They in many ways or at least three ways really of recording their history. That's right. A lot of their writings had to do with time in general. They were very focused, maybe preoccupied, with the idea of time, and that's where we get the idea um that they were how they came up with all the different calendars that they did, right, and calendars were important because they wanted to mark the passing of time, because they looked to heavenly bodies in the sky to interpret the behavior on the moods and whims of their gods, and many of their actions, whether it was you know, a ceremony for for planting, or for the economy or for accounting procedures were based on God's behavior. And almost like today how some people ascribe to astrology to determine how a person's personality may be influenced by their birth date. The Mayans use their calendar for similar purposes. That's right. In numbers them elves held a particular importance. Particular ones like the number thirteen, for instance, held sort of religious connotations with the represented levels of heaven where sacred lords ruled the your earth, and so the number thirteen is pretty important. And that applies over to the first calendar, which is called the zole Keying. I believe it's pronounced calendar, and we should mention too, there are all manner of pronunciations as far as we could tell in our research for the different increments of time and name for the Mind calendar. So um, we're assuming that there are some scholarly variations on pronunciation, but we are going to go with the most popular and to kick it off, like Jane said, the Zulking calendar also called the Sacred Round calendar. Let's let's break this down, and this is going to get a little bit painstaking, So if you're near a computer, it might actually be helpful if you could go to the House staff Works website and pull up the calendar. I'm so easy the article on how the Mind calendar works. That's right. Um, it'll be easier to visualize if you we have a nice animation on the site that will let you go through this Zolken calendar. Okay, so the basics. The Zolkan calendar is divided into two hundred sixty days, and this number is kind of significant of itself. Scholars kind of disagree. It might signify the length of pregnancy, but more than likely it probably signified the time of a corn crop exactly. So from here, two hundred sixty days are comprised of twenty different day names and thirteen different numbers. So imagine two circles, and around the outer larger circle we have the twenty day names listed and each one is represented by a glyph. Then on the inside circle it interlocked with thirteen different numbers. So is the inner circle turns a number matches up with a glyph of a day name, and if you're good at math, or you have a calculator nearby, you may figure it out. The two hundred sixty days. It's derived from the fact that twenty day names times thirteen numbers equals to sixty. Yeah, that's true, And so would go through the cycles of the days and the numbers together. And as you know, thirteen is less than twenty, so once it got through the thirteen numbers, it would go back to the first number, but continue on in the cycle of thet or sorry of the fourteenth day name exactly. So it just continues rotating until you reach two hundred sixty. And each combination of number and day name has a significant meaning. And the holy men and the agriculturalists of the mind civilization would use these numbers to predict auspicious times for ceremonies and crop planting. Like we said earlier, but there was a problem with the talking. I'm sorry, not the talking, well, some people stay talking. We're saying Zolking Zolking calendar, and that was that it didn't measure a full solar year like the Gregorian calendar would do. That's right. There were smart enough obviously to figure out that there were seasons and two hundred sixty days was not a solar year basically. And we should also mention that the Zolking calendar had segments of twenty days which they called wenols um u I and a L and so these segments of twenty days were particularly important, and they carried over into their other calendars as well, and this led to the hop calendar. And this is a calendar that was based on the cycle of the sun. And we know als were sort of the formative unit of the hop calendar. So as Jane said, a ween as a twenty day period, they were eighteen of these twenty day periods, which equalled three hundred sixty days. Now, as we know, again three hundred sixty days just not a full solar cycle, make so they're true, But three d and sixties a pretty even number, and I like it. Yeah, So the May Ends compensated for those five extra days by making them nameless days, and they refer to those as a way up. And that was a single month comprised of these five days, and they thought it was a very dangerous time, that's right. And the way it was kind of a compromise between the mathematicians and the astronomers, because obviously the astronomers knew like three sixty days is not a full solar year, but mathematicians loved the evenness of the number three sixty. So that's where they get the compromise of the way of And during this time, I was customary to pray vigilantly and to celebrate the gods and to beseech them for blessings on the civilization and hopes that you know, good, good tidings to be restored. Again. That's right, because during the way of they believe that gods sort of left the whole earth unprotected. So but again the samest song you'll hear this refrain a couple of times. It wasn't enough. They wanted a longer calendar. And uh, the even though the Hot calendar is closest to our Georgian calendar today, Um, they did want to record more time in a single calendar for historical reasons, to keep posterity, and so they came up with what's called the calendar Round. And this had eighteen thousand, eight hundred ninety days and encompassed fifty two years. But here comes out refrain again. It still wasn't long enough. Fifty two years was not enough, as you said it, and so they wanted to make it even longer. And this is the massive, most massive calendar I've ever heard of. Um, it's called the long Court calendar. We refer to it today, is that, and it measures time in great cycles, and a great cycle spans a little over five thousand, one hundred and twenty five years. Right, So the Long Count calendar also has its own individual units that it is comprised of. So let's go over those. We've got one day which is a keen, twenty days, the Wayne All which we've heard before, three hundred sixty days, a tune, seven thousand, two hundred days, a cartoon, one hundred forty four thousand days back tune. So we have all these different individual components going inside the Long Count calendar, and we see that it is very useful for measuring epics, really for giving historians something to um base their civilization on and predict future civilizations going on and and things like this. Yeah, it is actually a difficult test to be able to find the zero date, uh of the great cycles. For instance, that we're in a Great cycle right now, um, And in order to figure out what date today is in the Great cycle, we had to figure out what the first at the beginning of this Great cycle cycle was and that ended up being August thirteenth, three thousand one BC. And we didn't just come up with that number. Happened stance There was a British anthropologist named Sir Eric Thompson who wanted to reconcile these different calendars and in order to find out when the current great cycle began. He had to match up some different events from the Spanish Inquisition that had been recorded on the Dresden Codex, which was one of the mind governmental records that was spared from the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition, and he took that and compared it alongside the long Count calendar as well as the Gregorian calendar to come up with a definitive date. And like James said, that was Auguste h BC. So we're in the middle of a great cycle, that's right. But if you do the map, we're actually to end that great cycle, and that's where you get the date of December twenty one, which will end a cycle. But it's important to note that the Mayans believe that this is not the first cycle has ever existed. It's actually believe the fourth, and so the universe of the planet has lived through um already three cycles, the ends of three cycles. So the Mayans don't necessarily believe that the world will end at the end of this fourth one now, and they actually think that the ending of a cycle is a really wonderful time to celebrate and to appreciate the fact that the planet has made it through another great cycle. Yeah, but there is also another reason why people think that this might be the end of the world, because an interesting thing is going to happen on December, and that is that it is a winter solstice. But you know that happens every year, but it's also a particular winter solstice where the sun will along with the center of our galaxy, and that happens only every twenty six thousand years. So if you're like me and you're curious about what people say, you can do a Google search and pull up all number of different doomsday websites, and predictions for December ranged from the culmination of social strife and environmental catastrophe and in war a sort of amalgamating into a giant apocalypse. And some people say that a comet or asteroid is going to impact the Earth and we're all going to die, or that the magnetic field on the Earth is going to change and the polls will be reversed, or or hey, you could rent Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and sort of get a preview of what's going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting if you look at the idea that the minds were actually able to predict eclipses, which is pretty sophisticated for for what they knew. And so maybe you might be inclined to think, oh, well, did they know that this this crazy happened stance we can happen on that day too, But most of ronomers actually agree that they could not have known this. So hopefully, armed with that information from Candice and Jane, you be able to encourage your frightened friends that the mind calendar does not necessarily mean certain doom. And I personally like the idea of seeing the passing of such a huge amount of time as a reason to celebrate and be thankful I did too. I mean it seems like, just just as you celebrate the new year, uh, you'd celebrate this the passing of this huge chunk of time. So maybe we need to have like a long count calendar party time for that. UM. So we do have lots more to read on this, and if you want to share your own ideas about the mind calendar, UM, you can email us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at missing history, and we're on Facebook. And if you're still uncertain, then you'd like to explore this topic a little more, we have a couple of articles regarding the Mind Calendar and the twelve issue. We have how the Mind Calendar Works and will the World Really End in twelve? And you can look those up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com? Mmm

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm very Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and chocolate boarding. And I think one thing proven throughout history is that people really love a good doomsday propaty, don't they. It's so true. Just last year, we had a lot of news about the May one potential doomsday. I remember seeing billboards and news articles about it. It was kind of a kind of a story for a while. See I must have been living underground or because I remember I was in Italy at the time and the friends I was traveling with they mentioned that that was going on, and just sort of like, oh, yeah, this is going to happen maybe away. And I remember we were debating over like, well, how will we know what the time change when it's happening, because you know, when you're in a vacation, you don't even know what day. It as a lot of time. I know, I was at a friend's wedding and I remember her saying like, well, hey, you know, at least I'm throwing a big party with all my friends and family, so attitude. Yeah it is. But today we're gonna be looking both to the past and the future, and we're going to revisit an episode recorded in two thousand and eight by former podcast host Candice and Jane, and they discuss what's perhaps the most famous doomsday possibility out there at least these days, probably because it's still to come December twenty one, twelve, and that date is of course based on the so called mind calendar, really the Long Count calendar, and the fact that will be at least coming to the end of a great cycle that started back in BC. Many other doomsday prophecies have also been connected to great calendar changes like the Long Count, or otherwise around dates. Probably all but our youngest listeners remember y two k in which people feared not so much a great apocalypse but an electronic one still enough to hoard the water. Yeah, I mean it was scary to a lot of people. But at other points in history the predictions have also been date based, but for the sake of the date symbolic significance rather than just its roundness, like the year two thousands. So, for instance, many people in England feared the year sixteen sixty six because of that inauspicious series of numbers and the world of course didn't end, but a plague did strike the year before, and of course the Great London Fire, the Great Fire of London, I should say, occurred in sixteen sixty six, something we mentioned in our Famous Fires episode and really might have served to make people feel like potentially the world was coming to an end. Cosmic events sometimes also trigger doomsday prophecies, according to National Geographic For example, the nineteen ten appearance of Hayley's comment had folks scrambling for so called comic pills and oxygen supplies, which both were supposed to protect you from the comments tales noxious gases. Yeah, and in n the appearance of the hill pop comment um drove members of Heaven's Gate to commit suicide, expecting aliens following the comment to come rescue them. So, you know, I think this gives a pretty fair representation of all of the different kinds of reasons why people expect the apocalypse. And this was just a very small number of things we could have mentioned. But even the twelve event does have of cosmic element to it, It does have a year kind of significance to it, and we're gonna look into a little bit more about that in Candis and Jane's episode, So let's take a listen. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff sider Jane McGrath. Hey, they're Candice Jane. Did you take time the other day to watch all of the inauguration ceremonies and television footage? Know what? I was so busy eating at a chance, But I've been watching on YouTube and all like that. Okay, so you follow it up on all the stories of fashion, the speeches, the bloopers, etcetera. Of course, it was really fun in the house Stuff Works office because a couple of us dropped our work and we went into the common room and we watched the ceremony on TV, and it was it was really special, and not just because the Obama girls looked adorable and they're brightly colored clothes. Um, and because Rick Warren pronounced their names so fancifully. I have I have to quote him. Malia and Sasha. We really couldn't get enough. We've been saying around the office ever since then. But it was just really great to be in a room with intelligent people watching such a historic event. And I was thinking how utterly incredibly tragically sad that it is the last inauguration we will ever see because the world will end in Oh my goodness. I know Jane's a little bit on edge. I don't necessarily ascribe to that belief. I was trying to get everybody worked up excited for our podcast today, which is about the Mind Calendar. And if you are at all familiar with the Mayan Calendar, you may know that there's a prophecy that the world will end on December twenty one, twelve. That's true, and some people are a little on edge about this idea, although it doesn't have that much uh history in terms of the Mayan Calendar, in terms of what the mind is actually believed, which is interesting, right. I think a lot of the fuss can be attributed to doomsday speakers, and we actually got away popular. Yeah, well, because they're fun to hear about and they're fun to think about. The end of the world is always the end of the world. We actually got a listener email about the Mayan Calendar, and I'm not quite sure if our friend Molina is a a doomsday believer or if she just wanted to hear more of the story behind it. But she write to us, Hi, I'd like to know what the Mayans really say about this twelve end of days. I have heard many interpretations, most of which I think you're geared at selling books Smart Girl and Doomsday Gear. I'd like to know how accurate were their prediction sends and why this calendar was so important to them. So, Molina, here's the answer, and we will start by cracking the code behind the Mind Calendar. And to understand this week, we have to get a little context about the Lion civilization in general. I guess just to let you know, the Mayans, the whole empire was incredibly sophisticated. Uh. They existed around parts of what is now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, els Avaldoor, and parts of southern Mexico as well, and they were a very sophisticated culture. They actually started reading. They were one of the first meso Americans, the people in that Central American area to start writing at all in the pre Classic period, which went up to from between about two thousand BC and three. And you can actually divide the Mind civilization into three distinct periods. The format ever pre Classic, which Jane just mentioned, then the Classic followed in that reign from about three hundred until nine hundred and the post Classic from nine hundred to four hundred, and around that time we see the Mayan civilization sort of reaching out a bitter end when the Spanish Inquisition comes in and starts phasing the culture out. This true, and spellers are a bit baffled by what happened at the end of the Classic period is interesting. They were incredibly sophisticated, but there was a time about nine a d. Where they reached a sharp decline in their civilization. They left cities and temples abandoned. It was very odd, and scholars disagree about what caused this, whether it was exhausting the food supply or the rewards among people and do right Candice. The Spanish arrived and about the fourteen hundreds, like fourteen hundreds, and that sort of ended the period of the mind Empire in general. And we know a lot about mine history because these were people who left written records. They had a system of hieroglyphics that they used for recording myths and history and other governmental decrees things like this. They actually had sort of like a primitive type of book and paper that were bound together as well as stuli, which were large free standing stone monuments almost like an obelisk really, that they would carve things into. And in addition to hieroglyphics, they also had a logo, graphics and a phonetic syllabic sort of alphabets. They in many ways or at least three ways really of recording their history. That's right. A lot of their writings had to do with time in general. They were very focused, maybe preoccupied, with the idea of time, and that's where we get the idea um that they were how they came up with all the different calendars that they did, right, and calendars were important because they wanted to mark the passing of time, because they looked to heavenly bodies in the sky to interpret the behavior on the moods and whims of their gods, and many of their actions, whether it was you know, a ceremony for for planting, or for the economy or for accounting procedures were based on God's behavior. And almost like today how some people ascribe to astrology to determine how a person's personality may be influenced by their birth date. The Mayans use their calendar for similar purposes. That's right. In numbers them elves held a particular importance. Particular ones like the number thirteen, for instance, held sort of religious connotations with the represented levels of heaven where sacred lords ruled the your earth, and so the number thirteen is pretty important. And that applies over to the first calendar, which is called the zole Keying. I believe it's pronounced calendar, and we should mention too, there are all manner of pronunciations as far as we could tell in our research for the different increments of time and name for the Mind calendar. So um, we're assuming that there are some scholarly variations on pronunciation, but we are going to go with the most popular and to kick it off, like Jane said, the Zulking calendar also called the Sacred Round calendar. Let's let's break this down, and this is going to get a little bit painstaking, So if you're near a computer, it might actually be helpful if you could go to the House staff Works website and pull up the calendar. I'm so easy the article on how the Mind calendar works. That's right. Um, it'll be easier to visualize if you we have a nice animation on the site that will let you go through this Zolken calendar. Okay, so the basics. The Zolkan calendar is divided into two hundred sixty days, and this number is kind of significant of itself. Scholars kind of disagree. It might signify the length of pregnancy, but more than likely it probably signified the time of a corn crop exactly. So from here, two hundred sixty days are comprised of twenty different day names and thirteen different numbers. So imagine two circles, and around the outer larger circle we have the twenty day names listed and each one is represented by a glyph. Then on the inside circle it interlocked with thirteen different numbers. So is the inner circle turns a number matches up with a glyph of a day name, and if you're good at math, or you have a calculator nearby, you may figure it out. The two hundred sixty days. It's derived from the fact that twenty day names times thirteen numbers equals to sixty. Yeah, that's true, And so would go through the cycles of the days and the numbers together. And as you know, thirteen is less than twenty, so once it got through the thirteen numbers, it would go back to the first number, but continue on in the cycle of thet or sorry of the fourteenth day name exactly. So it just continues rotating until you reach two hundred sixty. And each combination of number and day name has a significant meaning. And the holy men and the agriculturalists of the mind civilization would use these numbers to predict auspicious times for ceremonies and crop planting. Like we said earlier, but there was a problem with the talking. I'm sorry, not the talking, well, some people stay talking. We're saying Zolking Zolking calendar, and that was that it didn't measure a full solar year like the Gregorian calendar would do. That's right. There were smart enough obviously to figure out that there were seasons and two hundred sixty days was not a solar year basically. And we should also mention that the Zolking calendar had segments of twenty days which they called wenols um u I and a L and so these segments of twenty days were particularly important, and they carried over into their other calendars as well, and this led to the hop calendar. And this is a calendar that was based on the cycle of the sun. And we know als were sort of the formative unit of the hop calendar. So as Jane said, a ween as a twenty day period, they were eighteen of these twenty day periods, which equalled three hundred sixty days. Now, as we know, again three hundred sixty days just not a full solar cycle, make so they're true, But three d and sixties a pretty even number, and I like it. Yeah, So the May Ends compensated for those five extra days by making them nameless days, and they refer to those as a way up. And that was a single month comprised of these five days, and they thought it was a very dangerous time, that's right. And the way it was kind of a compromise between the mathematicians and the astronomers, because obviously the astronomers knew like three sixty days is not a full solar year, but mathematicians loved the evenness of the number three sixty. So that's where they get the compromise of the way of And during this time, I was customary to pray vigilantly and to celebrate the gods and to beseech them for blessings on the civilization and hopes that you know, good, good tidings to be restored. Again. That's right, because during the way of they believe that gods sort of left the whole earth unprotected. So but again the samest song you'll hear this refrain a couple of times. It wasn't enough. They wanted a longer calendar. And uh, the even though the Hot calendar is closest to our Georgian calendar today, Um, they did want to record more time in a single calendar for historical reasons, to keep posterity, and so they came up with what's called the calendar Round. And this had eighteen thousand, eight hundred ninety days and encompassed fifty two years. But here comes out refrain again. It still wasn't long enough. Fifty two years was not enough, as you said it, and so they wanted to make it even longer. And this is the massive, most massive calendar I've ever heard of. Um, it's called the long Court calendar. We refer to it today, is that, and it measures time in great cycles, and a great cycle spans a little over five thousand, one hundred and twenty five years. Right, So the Long Count calendar also has its own individual units that it is comprised of. So let's go over those. We've got one day which is a keen, twenty days, the Wayne All which we've heard before, three hundred sixty days, a tune, seven thousand, two hundred days, a cartoon, one hundred forty four thousand days back tune. So we have all these different individual components going inside the Long Count calendar, and we see that it is very useful for measuring epics, really for giving historians something to um base their civilization on and predict future civilizations going on and and things like this. Yeah, it is actually a difficult test to be able to find the zero date, uh of the great cycles. For instance, that we're in a Great cycle right now, um, And in order to figure out what date today is in the Great cycle, we had to figure out what the first at the beginning of this Great cycle cycle was and that ended up being August thirteenth, three thousand one BC. And we didn't just come up with that number. Happened stance There was a British anthropologist named Sir Eric Thompson who wanted to reconcile these different calendars and in order to find out when the current great cycle began. He had to match up some different events from the Spanish Inquisition that had been recorded on the Dresden Codex, which was one of the mind governmental records that was spared from the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition, and he took that and compared it alongside the long Count calendar as well as the Gregorian calendar to come up with a definitive date. And like James said, that was Auguste h BC. So we're in the middle of a great cycle, that's right. But if you do the map, we're actually to end that great cycle, and that's where you get the date of December twenty one, which will end a cycle. But it's important to note that the Mayans believe that this is not the first cycle has ever existed. It's actually believe the fourth, and so the universe of the planet has lived through um already three cycles, the ends of three cycles. So the Mayans don't necessarily believe that the world will end at the end of this fourth one now, and they actually think that the ending of a cycle is a really wonderful time to celebrate and to appreciate the fact that the planet has made it through another great cycle. Yeah, but there is also another reason why people think that this might be the end of the world, because an interesting thing is going to happen on December, and that is that it is a winter solstice. But you know that happens every year, but it's also a particular winter solstice where the sun will along with the center of our galaxy, and that happens only every twenty six thousand years. So if you're like me and you're curious about what people say, you can do a Google search and pull up all number of different doomsday websites, and predictions for December ranged from the culmination of social strife and environmental catastrophe and in war a sort of amalgamating into a giant apocalypse. And some people say that a comet or asteroid is going to impact the Earth and we're all going to die, or that the magnetic field on the Earth is going to change and the polls will be reversed, or or hey, you could rent Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and sort of get a preview of what's going to happen. Yeah, it's interesting if you look at the idea that the minds were actually able to predict eclipses, which is pretty sophisticated for for what they knew. And so maybe you might be inclined to think, oh, well, did they know that this this crazy happened stance we can happen on that day too, But most of ronomers actually agree that they could not have known this. So hopefully, armed with that information from Candice and Jane, you be able to encourage your frightened friends that the mind calendar does not necessarily mean certain doom. And I personally like the idea of seeing the passing of such a huge amount of time as a reason to celebrate and be thankful I did too. I mean it seems like, just just as you celebrate the new year, uh, you'd celebrate this the passing of this huge chunk of time. So maybe we need to have like a long count calendar party time for that. UM. So we do have lots more to read on this, and if you want to share your own ideas about the mind calendar, UM, you can email us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at missing history, and we're on Facebook. And if you're still uncertain, then you'd like to explore this topic a little more, we have a couple of articles regarding the Mind Calendar and the twelve issue. We have how the Mind Calendar Works and will the World Really End in twelve? And you can look those up by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com? Mmm