Maya religious specialists who lend an authoritative indigenous avour to the various “millennial”8 theories concerning 2012.

What is the Maya Long Count?

Maya used the Long Count calendar during what scholars call the Classic Period of their culture, which lasted from roughly 250-900 CE. In fact, for some, use of this calendar on the ancient Maya stone monuments literally denes the Classic Period. The 21 December 2012 date simply marks the last day of the current bak’tun9 cycle, a period of 144,000 days roughly equivalent to 394 years that was known to the ancient Maya as a pik. More signicantly, it marks the end of the thirteenth bak’tun, the culminating period of a far larger calendar cycle that began on 11 August 3114 BCE,10 and that will come to fruition 1,872,000 days later on the 2012 winter solstice. It is important to point out that this so-called Great Cycle was only a minor component in far larger chronological periods that theoretically extend innitely backwards and forward in time within a system of exponentially increasing temporal cycles that have no nal beginning or ending points.