What the Maya Actually Recorded

The Long Count measures time from a mythological creation date in 3114 BCE in units that build on one another: twenty kin make a winal, eighteen winal make a tun, twenty tun make a katun, and twenty katun make a baktun. The date written 13.0.0.0.0, corresponding to December 2012 on the most commonly used correlation with the Gregorian calendar, marks the completion of the thirteenth baktun since that creation date, a round number in the Long Count's own counting system rather than a marker the Maya are known to have singled out as an ending.

Only one securely dated Classic Maya inscription mentions this date at all: Monument 6 from the site of Tortuguero, in southern Mexico, badly damaged and difficult to read in full. What survives states that the thirteenth baktun will be completed, and associates the date with the deity Bolon Yokte K'uh in connection with what most epigraphers read as some kind of ceremonial event or investiture, not a destruction of the world. Several proposed fuller translations remain disputed, and the passage is far too fragmentary to support any confident reading as a prophecy of catastrophe. Classic and Postclassic Maya cosmology as a whole treats time as cyclical, with earlier world-ages ending and beginning again, which is the opposite of a single, final doomsday.