Disturbing History - The "True Story" Of The Mayan Calendar

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

On July 12, 1562, in the Yucatán town of Maní, Franciscan friar Diego de Landa ordered Maya books, sacred objects, and religious images gathered in front of the church and burned. The destruction came at the end of a brutal campaign in which thousands of Maya people were interrogated, many under torture, and more than 150 died.But the story of Diego de Landa is more complicated than the fire he ordered.In this episode, Brian follows the strange trail left behind by one of the most consequential acts of cultural destruction in the history of the Americas, because the same man responsible for burning Maya texts also produced a manuscript that, centuries later, helped scholars begin deciphering Maya writing.From there, the episode separates the Maya civilization preserved in the archaeological record from the version that has taken shape in popular culture. Brian examines the 260-day ritual calendar that never truly disappeared, the origins of the Long Count, and the extraordinary inscriptions at Yaxchilán depicting royal bloodletting as an act of political and spiritual power.He follows the arrival of foreign warriors at Tikal in 378, the capture and beheading of Copán’s king, and new DNA evidence from Chichén Itzá that overturned the familiar legend of sacrificed maidens and replaced it with a far more disturbing reality.The episode also dismantles the 2012 apocalypse story using the Maya inscriptions themselves and looks at what archaeologists now understand about the so-called Maya collapse: prolonged drought, warfare, political breakdown, abandoned cities, and evidence of communities burning long-established centers as the old order came apart.But the Maya story did not end when the great cities emptied, and it did not end with the Spanish conquest. Brian follows that history through the Caste War of Yucatán, into the twentieth-century violence documented by Guatemala’s truth commission, and finally to the daykeepers of Momostenango, where the ancient count of days is still being maintained today.This is not simply the story of a civilization that disappeared.It is the story of what was deliberately destroyed, what endured in spite of it, and how centuries later we finally began to understand the difference.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. The church at Mani is still standing. It's a Franciscan convent in the middle of the Yucatan, built in the 1540s out of pale limestone by Maya hands, and if you go there today, you can stand on the open ground in front of it, which means you

can stand where the fire was. On the 12th of July, 1562, that ground held a crowd, a row of prisoners, and a pile. The Spanish had made an occasion. of it. The province's chief magistrate, a man named Diego Kejada, had come out from Merida with other officials to sit alongside the friars. The prisoners were Maya men from Mani, and the towns around it, and they'd spent the previous two months being interrogated by rope. Their wrists had been tied behind their backs, and they'd been hoisted off the ground and left hanging, and when that didn't produce the right answers, stones had been tied to their feet. Some had been burned with wax. Some had water forced into them. By the time of the ceremony, a number of the men who'd gone through it

couldn't use their arms, and some of the men who'd gone through it were already dead. The ones who could still stand were brought out in front of their neighbors to hear their sentences. Some were flogged. Some had their heads shaved. Some were sentenced to years of forced labor far from home. And then there was the pile. It held carved wooden figures, stone idols, ceramic vessels, and stacked among them, the books. The books were unlike anything the Spanish had at home. They were long strips of bark paper, folded back and forth into screens, coated in white lime plaster, and painted on both sides, in red and black.

The pages carried columns of signs, faces, and hands, and animals, and marks nobody in Europe could read. Inside those signs were the accumulated records of a civilization that had been writing for well over a thousand years. It's astronomy, its prophecy, its history, and the workings of the most elaborate calendar

any people on Earth has ever kept. A friar named Diego de Londa gave the order, and the pile burned. Landa wrote about it years later in Spain in a single sentence that historians have been staring at ever since. He said the Maya had a great number of books in these characters,

and since they contained nothing but superstition and the lies of the dead, devil. We burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree. That's his phrasing, by the way, not mine, regretted to an amazing degree. He was describing the people standing in front of him, watching their libraries turn to ash. I've read that sentence more times than I can count, and what stops me isn't the fire. It's what Landa did next, because the same man, in the same manuscript, wrote down the names of the 20 Maya days. He just, drew the glyph for each one.

He recorded the 18 months, the ceremonies, the way the years were counted, and he sat with Maya informants trying to force their writing into a Spanish alphabet, and the garbled record he made of that failure is the single document that, four centuries later. Let us read Maya writing once again. The man who destroyed the library also wrote the card catalog. So this is an episode about the Maya, and it's really an episode about that problem.

Almost everything the modern world believes about these people, the peaceful stargazers, the vanished civilization, the calendar that ends the world, turns out to be wrong and provably wrong, using the Maya's own words. But the trail of evidence that proves it runs through burned libraries, tortured witnesses, looted tombs, a manuscript lost for 300 years,

a book found in a basket of trash, and a priest who managed to be both the worst thing that ever happened to Maya riding and the reason it survived. I'm going to walk you through that trail the way the record actually lays it out, what the Maya wrote about themselves, what was done to them, what we genuinely know, what we only think we know, and where the difference is between those two things. It starts with how the fire got lit. The fire was the end of a process that had started about two months earlier,

and the process is worse than the fire. In May of 1562, two Maya boys near Mahoney led some Franciscans to a cave. Inside, they found carved idols, and they found what they reported as a human skull and other remains. The friars in Magni concluded that the Maya of the region, who'd been baptized and were nominally Christian, had never stopped practicing the old religion in secret. Landa was the Franciscan provincial at the time, meaning the senior friar in the province. He'd been in Yucatine. He'd been in Yucatine, since 1549, and he had no formal authority from the Inquisition, because the Inquisition as an institution hadn't been established in the Americas yet. But he treated the cave at Mani as proof

of mass apostasy, and he opened an inquiry using inquisitorial methods, which is where the rope came in. The Spanish records call the technique the Garucha, the hoist. The friars asked the same questions until they got the answers they were looking for. And then they asked the next man, and the confessions started to match. A Spanish inquiry conducted three years later after complaints reached the colonial authorities produced the numbers that historians still cite.

Roughly 4,500 Maya were questioned under torture during the summer of 1562. 158 died during or shortly after interrogation. At least 13 killed themselves rather than be taken. Another 18 disappeared, and a larger number were left with permanent injuries. Those figures come from the colonial investigation, not from Landa, and the investigation had its own motives. The Encomenderos, the Spanish landholders, resented the friars and were happy to see Landa's methods documented. So the count may have been inflated by people with a grudge.

It also may have been undercounted because the friars weren't keeping careful books on who died in their custody. What nobody disputed at the time, including Landa's own defenders, was that the torture happened and that a lot of people died. The confessions themselves are the part I find hardest to sort out. Under torture, Maya men admitted to human sacrifice. Some admitted to sacrificing children. Some said sacrifices had taken place inside churches. Some said the victims had been crucified.

The historian Inga Clendenin, who worked through the Mani testimony in the 1980s, pointed out the obvious thing about the crucifixion confessions. Crucifixion wasn't a Maya practice. It was the central image of the religion the friars were preaching. When a man under torture tells you that the secret rights in the church involved the exact form of death you've been showing him on the wall for 10 years, you're probably hearing your own sermon reflected back at you.

But that doesn't mean every confession was false. The Maya of the northern lowlands had practiced human sacrifice before the Spanish arrived, and there's no serious reason to think it stopped cleanly at baptism. Clendenin's take on it is that the Manny Confessions are a mixture of real continuing practice, exaggerated accounts shaped to satisfy the interrogators, an outright fabrication, and that nobody has a reliable way to separate the three. What the Friars decided to do with the confessions is what you already heard. The Audotafé at Mani, the sentences read out in front of the church, and the pile going into the fire.

Londa's own count of the books doesn't exist. He wrote a great number and left it there. A separate report on the Mane Proceedings lists 27 hieroglyphic books among the objects destroyed. I've seen that number repeated in a lot of places, and I've seen it questioned, because the document it comes from isn't Londas, and its author may have been counting only what was inventoried, not everything that burned.

27 is the number that survives. The real total is unknown. The scale of that loss depends on how long they'd been writing. The Maya had been making books for well over a thousand years by 1562. Painted fragments of bark paper books have been found in classic period tombs, dating to the 5th and 6 centuries, though the pages have decayed into unreadable lumps of plaster. The scribes at cities like Tikal, Copan, and Palank,

were literate in a full writing system, with several hundred signs, capable of recording anything a person could say. Today, four Maya books exist. One is in Dresden. It's a screenfold of 39 leaves painted on both sides, containing astronomical tables so precise that they track the cycles of Venus over centuries, while staying within a day of the planet's actual movements.

Nobody knows exactly how it reached Europe. It surfaced in Vienna in 1739, when the director of the Dresden Royal Library bought it from a private owner, and it had probably been sitting in someone's collection since the early colonial period. A second is in Madrid, in two pieces that were separated for years,

and identified as halves of the same book in the 1880s. It's longer than the Dresden book, cruder in execution, and deals mostly with ritual and divination. The third is in Paris, and it's badly damaged. It was found in 1859 and about basket of old papers in a corner of the National Library, wrapped in a sheet with a name written on

it, and nobody knows how it got there. The fourth turned up in the 1960s in Mexico, under circumstances that made most scholars assume it was a forgery for the next 50 years. That fight is its own story, and it comes later. Four books. Everything else is stone, ceramic, and the wall paintings that survived in a handful of buried rooms. The word everything isn't quite right, though. The Maya kept writing after the conquest. They wrote in their own languages using the Spanish alphabet, and some of what they wrote down in the 16th and 17th centuries was clearly copied from older books that have since vanished. The books of Chilam Balam from the northern Yucatan contain prophecies, calendar counts, and histories that were being recopied by Maya scribes into the 1800s.

The Popple Vu, the creation narrative of the Kichae Maya of the Guatemalan Highlands, was written out in the alphabet sometime around 1555, and the men who wrote it said outright that they were working from an older book they could no longer show in public. So the fire at Mani didn't take everything. It took the originals. What we have from the Maya's own hand is what four screenfolds and a few thousand stone inscriptions can hold. Plus whatever the colonial era scribes remembered well enough to write, down again. Landa was sent back to Spain to answer for what happened at Machne.

Francisco de Torral, the newly appointed bishop of Yucatan, arrived in August of 1562, a few weeks after the auto dafei, and stopped the inquiry immediately. He released the prisoners still in custody, took testimony about the torture, and wrote to the crown that Landa had exceeded any authority a friar could hold. Landa went to Spain in 1563. It took the council of the Indies until 1569 to clear him. During that time sitting in Spain with no diocese and no province, he wrote the manuscript that became the Relacion de las Casas de Yucatan, a count of the things of Yucatan.

He wrote it as a defense. The bulk of it isn't about the inquiry at all. It's a description of the Maya, their history, their towns, their food, their marriage customs, their calendar, and their writing. Landa's argument, roughly, was that he understood these people better than his critics did, and that the things he'd found among them justified what he'd done.

The original manuscript is lost. What survives is an abridgment. A copy made decades after Landa's death by someone who left out large sections and rearranged others. That copy sat in a library in Madrid for nearly 300 years, uncatalogued and unread, until a French priest named Charles Etienne Brasser de Bourbourg, founded in 1862, and published it two years later. Londa himself was cleared, went back to Yucatan as its bishop in 1573, and died there in 1579.

He was buried at the Franciscan convent in Merida. The Maya he'd tortured had been in their graves for 17 years by then, and the manuscript he wrote to justify the fire turned out to contain the drawings of the day signs, the month signs, and the bungled alphabet that a Russian linguist named Yuri Kunirazov would use in the 1950s. To crack the Maya script from a library in Leningrad, to read what the Maya wrote about their own calendar, we've had to go through the man who burned it.

So it makes sense to start with what he saw when he looked at their year. Landa asked them to write. This is the moment in the relation that turned out to matter more than any other. and he had no idea. He was trying to make sense of the script, and his method was to ask a Maya informant to draw the sign for each letter of the Spanish alphabet. He'd say a letter in Spanish,

and the man would draw something. The problem was that Maya writing doesn't have letters. It has syllables, and it has whole word signs. So when Landa said the letter B, which in Spanish is pronounced Besh, his informant drew the glyph for the syllable Bech, when Landa said, L pronounced El Ere. The man drew the sign for L, and then the sign for Ere. Stay tuned for more

disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Landa wrote them all down in a row, called it the Maya alphabet, and reported that it made no consistent sense to him. At one point he asked the informant to write a full sentence, anything at all, and the man wrote something Landa dutifully copied without understanding. When the glyphs were read almost 400 years later, they said, said, I don't want to. That row of mismatched signs sat in the abridged manuscript in Madrid, and then in Brassur's printed edition for close to a century while the leading scholars in the field insisted Maya writing was not phonetic and couldn't be. The dominant figure in Maya studies for most of the 20th century was a British archaeologist named Eric Thompson, and Thompson held,

with real force, that the glyphs were pictures of ideas and had no sound values. Landa's alphabet in Thompson's view was a confused priest's misunderstanding and nothing more. Narazov, working in Leningrad in the early 1950s without access to the sites or most of the scholarship, took Lundas list seriously as a syllabary and used it to read a few words in the Dresden and Madrid codices. He published in 1952. Thompson attacked him for the rest of his life, and most Western scholars sided with Thompson until the 1970s. The script was subdued. substantially readable by the 1990s, and the syllable values Knorazov derived from Landa's list are

with corrections, the ones in use now. Landa recorded the script accurately without understanding it, and a man he never met read it correctly without ever seeing a Maya city until he was in his 60s. That's the kind of chain the evidence for this whole subject hangs on. What Landa did understand, at least partly, was the calendar. He described two cycles running at once, and his description matches what the inscriptions show. The first cycle is 260 days long. It's made of 13 numbers and 20-day names, running together, so that day one pairs with the first name, day two with the second, and so on. And when the numbers run out at 13, they start over while the names keep going.

It takes 260 days for the same number to land on the same name again. Most books call this cycle the Zulkin. That word isn't ancient. A scholar named William Gates, coined it in the 1920s, from Yucatec Maya roots, meaning something like count of days. The Maya of the classic period had their own name for it, and it's lost. The Kaichae Maya and the Guatemalan highlands, who still keep this count, call it the Cholkija. I'm going to call it the 260-day count, because that's what it is. nobody has established why it's 260 days.

That's not me being coy. There's no text that explains it, and no scholarly agreement. The proposals I've seen include the length of a human pregnancy, which is close, but not exact. The interval between two passages of the sun directly overhead at the latitude of some early Maya sites, which works out to about 260 days at a few specific places and not at others. A convenient multiple of the 13 levels,

of heaven and the 20 digits on a person's hands and feet. Each of these has defenders. None has evidence from the Maya themselves. What can be shown is that this cycle is old. It shows up in the Wahaka Valley among the Zapotech, several centuries before it appears in Maya inscriptions, and it was used across Mesoamerica by people who spoke unrelated languages for at least two and a half thousand years. It's the one piece of the Maya calendar that's still in daily use. In the town of Momostanango in Guatemala there are people called daykeepers who track the count without written aides and when the anthropologist Barbara Tedlock trained as one in the 1970s the count they were keeping matched day for

day the count recorded on stone monuments a thousand years earlier the line was never broken the second cycle is the one that looks like a year it's 365 days divided into 18 named periods of 20 days each which comes to 360 plus five extra days at the end. Landa called those five days unlucky and said the Maya stayed home during them, didn't wash or comb their hair, and avoided any serious work because anything begun in that period would go badly. The Yucotech name for the five days was Yib. That's one of the details from Landa that the later Maya sources confirm. The books of Chilom Balam treat the Yib days the same way. The 365-day cycle had no leap day. Over centuries, it drifted against the seasons

by about a day every four years, and the Maya knew it did. There's a lot of confident writing out there about how the Maya calendar was more accurate than the European one. That claim needs to be sorted. Their astronomical tables were extremely accurate. Their civil year wasn't corrected for the quarter day at all. They seemed to have tracked the drift rather than fixing it. and I haven't found a good explanation for why. Run the two cycles together and you get a combined position that repeats every 18,980 days. That's 52 of the 365-day years.

Scholars call the whole thing the calendar round. Within one round, every day has a unique name, made from its position in both cycles. After 52 years, the names start repeating. That's the part of the calendar most of Mesoamerica shared. The Aztecs used the same 52-year round, and they marked the end of each one with a ceremony where every fire in the empire was put out and relit from one new flame. The Maya had something else, and this is where they diverge from everyone around them. They kept a running count of days from a fixed starting point, and unlike the cycles, it never reset.

The scholar's name for it is the long count. It's written as a sequence of five numbers. The smallest unit is one day. 20 days make the next unit. 18 of those make a period of 360 days, which is close to a year and was often treated like one. 20 of those make a period of about 20 years. 20 of those make a period of about 394 years.

The Maya names for the last two, Khatun and Bakhtun, are the ones you'll hear most. Khatun is attested in the inscriptions. Bakhtun is a modern reconstruction. Nobody's found it written. The count starts from a day the inscriptions describe as the end of the previous count, and the beginning of the current world. Working backward, that day falls in the year 3,114 before the Common Era,

on either the 11th or the 13th of August, depending on which correlation you accept. The starting date is thousands of years before any Maya city existed, and thousands of years before there's any evidence anyone in the Americas was writing. So the Maya didn't start counting days in 3,114 and keep going. They were projecting backward. At some point, someone calculated where the count should begin and set the zero there. When that happened, and who did it, is unknown. What's better known and rarely mentioned is that the earliest long count dates aren't in Maya territory.

The oldest one that can be read with confidence is on a stone at Chiapta de Corso, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and it corresponds to. to the year 36 before the common era. The second oldest is on a broken stela at Trezz Zapotez and Veracruz in the Olmec heartland and it falls four years later. Neither site was Maya. Both are in the region where the Olmec and their successors lived and the language of those inscriptions is either not Maya or not yet readable. The earliest long count date that's securely in the Maya lowlands is on a monument at Tikal and it corresponds to the year 290 of the Common Era.

That's three centuries after Chiapta de Corso. There are a few earlier candidates on the Pacific slope of Guatemala at sites like Takalikabage and Elbao. And those are probably Maya, but the readings are contested and the dates are damaged. The honest summary is that the long count was probably invented somewhere on the Gulf Coast of Mexico by people who weren't Maya.

And the Maya adopted it, refined it, and used it more intensively, and for far longer than anyone else. The idea that the Maya invented the long count is repeated in nearly every popular treatment. The stones say otherwise. The long count only becomes useful to a historian if you can match it to a European date,

and that's the correlation problem. The way it was solved mostly was by triangulation. Landa recorded a Maya date for a specific day in 1553. The books of Chalam Ballam record the ends of the 20-year periods in the colonial era alongside Christian years. The Dresden Codex contains tables of Venus and of eclipses

that only line up with real astronomical events if the correlation is right. Three scholars working in 1905, 1926, and 1927 independently converged on a number. Their names were Goodman, Martinez Hernandez, and Thompson, and the result is called the GMT correlation. The number is a count of days between the Julian calendar's starting point and the Maya Zero date. Goodman's original figure and Thompson's revised one differ by two days. Most scholars now use the earlier figure which puts the Maya Zero on the 11th of August,

3,114 before the common era. A minority following Thompson's revision used the 13th. The two-day gap has never been closed and the debate about it has been going on for 90 years. For most purposes, two days doesn't matter. It matters if you're trying to date an eclipse, or if you're claiming the calendar ends on a specific day, which people were doing very loudly not long ago. For a while, there was a real question about whether the whole correlation was off by centuries.

Some scholars propose shifts of 260 years in either direction, based on ceramic dating and on alternate readings of the Chilumballum. That question was mostly settled in 2013, when a team used radiocarbon dating on a carved wooden lintel from a temple at Tikal. The lintel carried a long count date. The radiocarbon result worked through a statistical model that accounts for the tree's growth rings, matched the GMT correlation within a few years, and ruled out the big shifts. The framework holds.

When I say a Maya king was crowned in the year 683, I'm relying on Landa's colonial note, a set of colonial Maya manuscripts. a Venus table in a book in Germany, and a piece of sapadilla wood from Guatemala, all pointing the same way. That's as solid as anything in this field gets, and it's still two days wide. Once the dates could be read, the next question was what the Maya had been dating. For the first half of the 20th century, the answer everyone accepted was that they'd been dating time itself. Thompson and the scholars around him believed the inscriptions on the stone monuments were records of astronomy and ritual, set up by a priesthood that worshipped the calendar.

The Maya in this picture were a peaceful people governed by astronomer priests who cared about the movements of Venus and not much else. That version made it into textbooks, museum labels, and a generation of popular books. Some of it is still in circulation. It fell apart in 1960. A researcher named Tatiana Proscouriacov, who'd started her career as an architectural illustrator at the Carnegie institution was studying the monuments at a site called Piedras Negra on the Usumachina River.

She noticed that the steli there came in groups and that each group covered a span of dates that fit inside a human lifetime. The first date in each group was followed always by the same glyph. A second date, somewhere between 12 and 31 years later, was followed by another glyph. The pattern repeated, group after group. Her explanation was that the first glyph, meant born, and the second meant took the throne, and that the groups of monuments were the reigns of individual kings. She was right. The inscriptions weren't about the calendar. They were about people, and the calendar was the frame they hung the people on. Within about 20 years, scholars using Proscurokhov's approach and Norozov's syllables had reconstructed the dynasties of a dozen

cities. And what the dynasties recorded over and over was war. The clearest example I know of is on a set of carved stone lentils from a city called Yakschilan on the Mexican side of the Osumachinta. The lentils were set over the doorways of one building and they were commissioned by a king whose name reads as a Itzumnaj Balam, usually translated as shield jaguar. He ruled Yachilan for more than 60 years, from 681 to 700. The building was dedicated to his principal wife, a woman named Cabal Suk. The first Lentel shows her kneeling in front of her husband. She's pulling a rope through her tongue.

The rope is studded with thorns. The blood runs down onto a bowl of paper strips at her knees. Shield Jaguar stands over her holding a torch, which tells us it happened at night or indoors. The date carved next to the scene works out to the 28th of October, 709. The second lintel shows what came next, at least as the Maya understood it. Kabul Zook is kneeling again, looking up, and out of the bowl of burning paper rises a serpent, and out of the serpent's open mouth comes an armed figure. The text identifies the vision as the founder of the dynasty, or a deity associated with him.

The date on this one is her husband's accession, in 681. So the pictures say that the queen bled from her tongue, burned the blood-soaked paper, and saw an ancestor come out of the smoke. Whether she saw anything or what she experienced isn't something a stone can tell us. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. What the stone tells us is that this was what a Maya king wanted

carved over the door of his wife's building and that he wanted it dated. The stingray spine was the standard tool. They've been found in tombs, sometimes in a set with an obsidian blade and a bone-aw. sometimes placed at the pelvis of a male skeleton. Landa, writing about the 16th century Yucatec Maya, described men perforating their penises and passing a cord through them,

several men at once, threaded together in a line. He wrote it with the disgust you'd expect. He didn't invent it. The same act is drawn on classic period ceramics from 800 years earlier. Blood from the tongue, blood from the penis, blood from the earlobes, all offered to the gods and the ancestors, by the highest ranking people in the society.

It's on the monuments, because they were proud of it. That's a different thing from a priesthood watching Venus. The Yakschelan Lennels were pried out of the building in the 1880s by an English explorer named Alfred Maudslay and shipped to the British Museum, where they still are. The building they came out of stands on the riverbank with empty doorways. Then there's what happened at Tikal on the 15th of January, 378. Tikal is the biggest of the classic Maya cities in the northern Patin of Guatemala,

and its own monuments record the story. A man arrived. The glyph used for his arrival is the same one used for arriving at a place after a journey. His name is written as Syaj Kak, which reads as something like, Fire is Born. The text says he came from the west. On the same day he arrived, the king of Tikal died. The king's name was Choctok Ichak.

and the inscription uses a phrase that reads as Entered the Water, which is a Maya expression for death. Within a year, a new king was on the throne of Tikal. He was a boy. His father wasn't from Tikal and wasn't a Maya. The father's name is written with a glyph that shows an owl holding a spear thrower. And the spear thrower, the Atlottel,

was the signature weapon of a city 800 miles away in the valley of Mexico. That city is Teotihuacan. None of this was understood until the year two, when an epigrapher named David Stewart put the pieces together in a paper that re-read several Ticall monuments as a single account. What the monuments describe is a foreign takeover. A military commander from the direction of Teotihuacan arrives, the local king dies that day, and the son of a Teotihuacan lord is installed in his place. The new king's own portrait on a later stella shows him in Teotihuacan dress,

with a Teotihuacan spear thrower, flanked by his father's image. Stewart was careful about what the texts don't say. They don't say Chok-Tak-I-Chuk was killed. They don't describe a battle. They record an arrival and a death on the same day, and a new dynasty afterward, and the reader is left to connect them. Most scholars now do connect them,

and the arrival of Siajkak is treated as one of the turning points of Maya history, because the Tikal dynasty he installed went on to dominate the region. for centuries. But the causal link is an inference from a sequence of dates. It's a strong one. It's still an inference. Before Stewart's paper, the Teotihuacan presence at Tikal was explained as trade, or cultural fashion, or the Maya elite adopting foreign styles, because they liked them. The dates were sitting on the stones the whole time. If the lintel show what the kings did to themselves, and Tikal shows what they did to each other, the paintings at Bonham Pack show what they did to prisoners. Bonapak is a small site in Chiapas near the Guatemalan border.

In 1946, an American photographer named Giles Healy was taken by Lock-and-on-Maya guides to a building with three rooms, and inside the rooms, under centuries of mineral crust, were murals covering every wall. They were painted around the year 790, and they're the most complete Maya wall paintings that survive. The second room shows a battle and its aftermath. On one wall, warriors and jaguar pelts drag captives by the hair. On the wall opposite, the captives sit on the steps of a platform below the king.

Their fingernails have been torn out. Blood drips from their fingertips. One captive lies stretched across the steps, and next to him is a severed head. The king stands over them in full regalia, and the accompanying text gives the date. That's a documented royal commission, painted for the people who ordered it, showing them tearing the fingernails out of prisoners before the killing started. When Bonampac was found, it was the single largest correction to the Astronomer Priest's picture, and it came 14 years before Prescouriaf's paper.

The murals were known and photographed. Thompson saw them. The interpretation held on anyway for another two decades. The calendar and the wars were tied together in a way that took a long time to see. There's a glyph in the war inscriptions that shows a star, or the sign for Venus, with liquid pouring down from it onto a place name or an earth sign. Epigraphers call it the Star War Glyph, and it marks a specific kind of event, apparently the decisive defeat of a city rather than a raid. The earliest clear use of it is at a site called Caracol in Belize,

on an altar that records a Star War against Tikal in the year 562. Takal, the city that Siajkak had remade two centuries earlier, stops carving monuments after that date. The gap lasts about 130 years. Archaeologists call it the Tikal hiatus, and for decades it was a mystery, because nobody could read the altar at Caracol. Once it was red, the hiatus had a cause with a date on it, and the winner had put its name on the record. Whether the star in the glyph means the wars were timed to the movements of Venus is a real argument. Some scholars have matched Star War dates against the Venus tables and found that a lot of them fall near the planet's first appearance as Evening Star.

Others have run the same numbers and found the match no better than chance. I've read both sides, and I don't think either has closed it. What isn't in dispute is that the Maya put a Venus sign on the glyph for their most serious kind of war and that the same people who kept the Venus tables in the Dresden Codex were keeping the dates of the battles. The kings didn't always win. On the 3rd of May, 738, the 13th ruler of Copan in what's now Honduras, was captured and beheaded by the ruler of Curigua,

a much smaller city about 30 miles north. The Copan King's name is long and I'll do my best to do it justice. Earlier scholars called him 18 Rabbit from a misreading of his name Glyph, and that nickname stuck. He'd ruled for 43 years and built most of what tourists see at Capon today. Kyrgygua had been a subordinate town, probably founded from Kapan, and its ruler, Kaak Tiliu Chan Yopat, had taken office under 18 Rabbits Authority. The monuments at Kirigua record the capture with a verb that reads as Axe.

18 Rabbit was taken and decapitated. The Copan inscriptions record the same event in more restrained language, and then Then Copan goes quiet. No new monuments were dedicated there for about 17 years. When the city started carving again in 755, the next king built the largest hieroglyphic text in the Americas, a stairway with more than 2,000 glyphs, laying out the entire dynasty from its founder forward as if to reassert that the line was intact. Kyrigua, in the meantime, used its new independence to put up the tallest freestanding stone monuments the Maya ever carved. One of them is more than 30 feet high and weighs an estimated 65 tons.

What the texts don't explain is why. Why a subject town rebelled, whether it had help from a larger power, and what the King of Kapan was doing 30 miles from home in a position to be captured, are questions the inscriptions don't address. One reading is that he was ambushed on a ritual journey. Another is that Kyrigua had quietly aligned with Kapan's rival, Kalakmul. Both are plausible. Neither is written down.

Human sacrifice is the subject where the gap between what people think and what's documented is widest, and it's wide in both directions. The popular version is that the Maya were a gentle, mystical civilization, and that the Aztecs were the ones with the blood. The counter version, which took over after Bonampak and the decipherment, is that the Maya were every bit as violent. Neither is quite right,

and the evidence is more specific than either. Start with Landa. He described several kinds of sacrifice among the Yucatec Maya of his own time. Victims shot with arrows. Victims held down on a stone while a priest opened the chest and removed the heart. And at Chechen Itza, the great city of the northern plains that had been in decline for centuries by them, a natural sinkhole, a sonode, into which he said living people were thrown during droughts.

He wrote that the Maya believed the victims didn't die, though they were never seen again. For three and a half centuries, that passage was the only evidence for the sonote. Then, between 1904 and 1910, an American named Edward Thompson, who'd bought the plantation that included the ruins, brought in a dredge, and started hauling up the bottom of the sinkhole. He found gold, jade, copal incense, wooden objects preserved in the mud, and human bones. The bones went to Harvard where an anthropologist named Ernest Houton examined them in the 1930s. Of the skulls he could assess, about half were children.

The adults were more often men than women. Houten's line about it, which has been quoted for 90 years, was that whoever the victims were, they weren't the beautiful virgins of popular imagination. That part of the myth still hasn't died. Travel writing about Chechen-I-Zah routinely refers to maidens thrown into the Sonote. The bones say children of both sexes and adult men. In 2024, the picture got sharper. A team led by a geneticist named Rodrigo Barkera published DNA results from 64 individuals buried in a chilton, an underground storage chamber near the Sanote. The burials date from about the 7th century to the 12th. Every one of the 64 was male. Most were between three and six years old. A quarter of them were closely related to at least one other child in the chamber. Two pairs were identical twins.

That's not random. And to see why, you need the one Maya story that survived the fire in something close to its original form. The Papal Vu was written down in the Kaichae's language, using the Spanish alphabet, by members of the Kaichae's nobility and the Highlands of Guatemala, sometime in the 15th. The writers say in the text that the original book existed but could no longer be shown, which most scholars read as a reference to the friars. That alphabetic manuscript is also lost. What survives is a copy made around 1702 by a Dominican priest named Francisco Jimenez,

who found the manuscript in the parish of Chichikastinango, copied it out and set a Spanish translation beside it. His copy is in a library in Chicago. Everything anyone knows about the Popple Vu comes through it. The middle of the book is about two sets of twins. The first pair are ball players, and the noise of their game annoys the lords of the underworld. A place called Sibbalba, who summoned them down to play. The twins fail the Lord's tests and are killed.

The head of one of them is hung in a tree, where it spits into the hand of a passing daughter of the underworld, and she becomes pregnant and escapes to the surface. and there she gives birth to the second set of twins. The second pair grow up, find their father's ball gear, and are summoned to Shibaba in their turn. They survive the tests. A house of darkness, a house of blades, a house of cold, a house of jaguars, a house of fire, a house of bats. In the bat house, one of the twins is decapitated, and the Lord's use his head as the ball in the next game. The other twins substitutes a squash for the head, wins the game.

game and recovers his brother. The lords then burn the twins in an oven, and the twins come back as wandering performers who can kill a man and bring him back to life. The lords of death asked to be killed and revived as a trick, and the twins kill them and don't revive them. Then the twins rise into the sky as the sun and the moon. That story was known to the classic Maya. Scenes from it, including the twins, the ballgame, and the lords of Shibaba, are painted on ceramic vessels from the 7th and 8th centuries, 600 years before the Kiche wrote it down. The ball court was a standard feature of Maya cities. At Chichen Itza, the largest ball court in Mesoamerica has carved panels on its walls, showing a ball player being decapitated,

with the blood from his neck rendered as serpents. So when the DNA from the Chulton shows brothers and twins, the myth is the obvious frame. Whoever selected those boys was selecting for brothers, and specifically for twins over a period of centuries. The DNA also showed the children came from local populations, not captives brought from a distance. So at Chechenitsa, the documented practice was the ritual killing of local boys, including pairs of brothers and twins, over hundreds of years. Londa's account of live victims thrown into the synode in his own era is unconfirmed,

though the bones from the dredging don't rule it out, and the maidens were never there. there. Whether this was typical of the classic Maya cities to the south is a separate question. Captive sacrifice after warfare is well documented in the inscriptions and the art. Child sacrifice on the Chechenitsai scale is not so far, documented anywhere else. Chechenitsa was a late city with strong ties to central Mexico, and the practice there may reflect that, or it may reflect what the classic cities were doing too, and we haven't found the chambers. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. The Tomb of Pekal at Palank is a good place to talk about what the calendar was actually for, because it's also where the calendar was used to say something almost nobody notices. In 1952, a Mexican archaeologist named Alberto Ruz-Louisier finished clearing a stairway he'd found under the floor of a temple at Palanka in Chiapas. The stairway went down into the pyramid for 80 feet. At the bottom was a chamber with a stone sarcophagus, and inside it was a man. The temple is called the Temple of the Inscriptions, and the Inscriptions, once they could be read, identified the man.

His name was Ka'inich Janab Pakal. He was born in 603, became king at 12, and died in 683 at the age of 80. His reign is the longest documented for any Maya ruler. Two things about the tomb have generated more nonsense. than anything else in the field. The first is the sarcophagus lid. It shows pical reclining, falling backward into the jaws of the underworld,

with a world tree rising out of his body and a bird perched on top. In 1968, a Swiss writer named Eric von Danikin published a book claiming the lid showed an astronaut at the controls of a rocket. It doesn't. Every element on the lid appears in other Maya art with an established meaning.

The tree is the tree. The jaws are the jaws. The claim has sold millions of books and it has no support from anyone who can read the glyphs. The second thing is the age. When the skeleton was first examined, the physical anthropologists estimated the man had died in his 40s. The inscription said 80. For years, this was treated as evidence that the text couldn't be trusted, or that the tomb wasn't Pekal's. Later reanalysis found the original estimate was based on methods that under

estimate age and older individuals, and that the skeleton was consistent with an old man. The text had been right, and the bones had been misread. That's the calendar doing its ordinary job, pinning a life to dates that could be checked. The extraordinary job is on the same walls. The inscriptions in Pekal's Temple Project forward from his reign to a date that works out to the year 4,772 of the Common Era. The text says that on that day, the 80th anniversary of his accession, in the 52-year calendar round will be celebrated.

It's a date more than 4,000 years past his own death, and it's written in the same long count that supposedly ends in 2012. It doesn't end. The Palank scribes counted straight past the end of the 13th Great cycle and kept going, and they did it in the 7th century. The idea that the long count had a stopping point was never a Maya idea, which brings me to the 21st of December, 2012. I'm going to lay out where the idea came from, because the answer is not the Maya.

Here's what the Maya actually left. The long count reached the end of its 13th great cycle on that day. In the Maya scheme, the current world also began at the end of a 13th grade cycle, in 3,114. So the date has some symbolic weight. It's the first time since creation that the count reads the same way it read on day one. There is exactly one classic period inscription that mentions the 2012 date. It's on a broken monument from a site called Tortugero in Tabasco, and the relevant passage is damaged. What's readable says that on that day something will happen involving a deity named Bolon Yoktee Koo, who is associated with war and with transitions between periods. The verb is partly effaced.

Some epigraphers read it as descend. Others read it as witness or display. The end of the sentence which would say what the God does or where he goes is gone. That's it. One damage sentence. In 2012 itself, archaeologists at a site called La Corona in Guatemala found a hieroglyphic stairway that also referred to the date. The context was a king of Kalakmal who'd been defeated in a war in 695,

visiting La Corona the following year and titling himself in a way that linked his reign to the future completion of the 13th cycle. It reads as a king using a big round number in the calendar to reframe a bad year. It doesn't say anything about the world ending. Against those two texts, there's the Polonk inscription counting past 2012 to the year 4,772. And there's a stela at Koba in Quintana Rue that records the creation date with 20 additional units above the great cycle, each of them set to 13. Worked out, it describes a span of time so large that it's usually expressed as trillions of trillions of years.

Whoever carved it was making the point that the count doesn't stop. So where did the end of the world come from? The earliest version I can find in print is from an archaeologist, and a good one. Michael Coe, in the first edition of his book, The Maya, published in 1966, wrote a passage speculating that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world on the final day of the 13th cycle. He gave the date as December 24th, 2011, based on a correlation he later abandoned. Coe was writing loosely in a book for general readers, and he walked the passage back in later editions. But the idea was out. It was picked up in the 1970s and 80s by writers working outside archaeology.

A man named Jose Arguez built a spiritual, movement around it and organized a worldwide event in 1987 he called the harmonic convergence. Others tied the date to an alignment of the winter solstice sun with the center of the galaxy, which does occur gradually over a period of decades and which no Maya text mentions. By 2009, there was a disaster film with the date as its title, and by 2012, the phrase Mayan apocalypse was in the vocabulary of every news outlet on Earth. The people it landed on were living Maya. Guatemala has several million of them.

In the run-up to the date, Maya organizations in Guatemala issued public statements objecting to the way their calendar was being used, and Maya daykeepers who keep the 260-day count told reporters that the cycle turning was no different in kind from any other cycle turning. The Guatemalan government, meanwhile, promoted the date as a tourism event,

and the Maya groups objected to that too. What we actually know is one damaged sentence about a god, one stairway block about a king's bad year, and a lot of monuments counting past the date without comment. The apocalypse was written in English. Sometime around 1965, a Mexican collector named Hoseway Science was contacted by people who said they had a Maya book. According to the account he gave later,

he was flown to a remote airstrip, shown the book alongside some other objects, and bought it. The fine spot was said to be a dry cave in Chiapas. There was no documentation of any kind. Signs showed it to Michael Coe, and co-arranged for it to be exhibited at the Grolier Club in New York in 1971. It became known as the Grolier Codex.

It's ten damaged pages of a Venus Almanac, with figures in a style that mixes Maya and Central Mexican elements. Coe argued it was authentic. Eric Thompson argued it was a forgery, and Thompson's opinion carried the field for decades. The standard objection was that it looked like a pastiche, that the Venus table was too simple, and that a book surfacing through looters with no provenance

was exactly what a forgery would look like. In 2016 Co., along with Stephen Houston, Mary Miller, and Carl Taub, published a long analysis arguing that every feature Thompson had called Suspicious was in fact consistent with Maya practice, and that the sheer accumulation of small correct details, some of them not known to scholars in 1965, was beyond what a forger could have produced. Radiocarbon dating of the paper had already put it in the 11th or 12th century.

In 2018, the Mexican government's Archaeological Institute concluded its own examination, declared the book authentic, and renamed it the Maya Codex of Mexico. That makes it the oldest surviving book in the Americas. It predates the Dresden Codex by a century or two, and it spent 50 years being called a fake by the most powerful man in the field, who was also the man who'd said the script couldn't be read.

I don't bring that up to pile onto Thompson. He did enormous work, but it's the third time in this story that the consensus was wrong about the evidence, and the evidence was sitting in plain sight. The question people ask most about the Maya is what happened to them. The word that usually goes with the question is vanished. But they didn't vanish. There are somewhere between 6 and 7 million Maya people alive today,

speaking around 30 related languages in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. The daykeepers in Momostanango are Maya. The men who wrote the Popul Vu were Maya. The people Landa tortured at Mani were Maya. What happened in the 9th and 10th centuries is that the cities of the southern lowlands stopped. Monuments stopped being carved. Palaces stopped being maintained.

Populations that had been in the hundreds of thousands across the Patin dropped over about a century and a half to a small fraction of that, and the cities were abandoned to the forest. The last long-count date ever carved is at a site called Tonina in Chiapas, and it corresponds to the year 909. The reasons are, of course, argued about.

In 2012, a team led by Douglas Kennett published a climate record from a stalagmite in a cave called Yacht Balam in Belize. Stalagmites grow in layers, and the chemistry of each layer records how much rain was falling when it formed. The Yacht Balum record covers 2,000 years at a resolution of about six months. It shows a drying trend beginning around 660, and continuing for three centuries. Within that trend, it shows severe drought between 820 and 870, and the longest dry period in the whole record between 1020 and 1100. Lake sediment cores from the Yucatan and ocean sediment from the Caribbean show the same pattern. The drought lines up with the collapse. That's not the same as saying the drought caused it, and the people who published the record were careful about the difference.

What the same team argued, matching the climate record against the day. monuments, is that the wetter centuries before 660 coincided with population growth and the expansion of the cities, and that the drying coincided with the peak of recorded warfare, and then with the end of monument building. The cities had grown to their maximum size under conditions that then stopped. The warfare part shows up in the ground. In the Pitex-Batton region of Guatemala, a project led by Arthur Demarest in the 1990s excavated the city of Dosperi. Peles, which had been a regional power. Around 761 after a military defeat, the population of Dos Peles tore down their own temples

and palaces and used the stones to build defensive walls around the center of the city. They built them in a hurry. The walls cut across plazas and through buildings. Then the city was abandoned anyway. The nearby site of Agueteca, on a cliff above a lake, was fortified with walls and then burned, household goods left in place on the floors of the houses as if the residents had run. So the last century of the classic cities looks in the ground like drought, war, and people pulling their own monuments apart to make barricades.

Which of those was the cause and which was the effect isn't a question the evidence settles. What it shows is that they arrive together. And the northern cities on the Yucatan plain went on. Chichanidza rose as the southern cities fell. Maya Pond followed it. When the Spanish arrived, the Yucatan was full of Maya towns with Maya lords and Maya books. The collapse was regional, not total, and the thing that collapsed was a political system

and a settlement pattern, not a people. The books of Chilombaulam Balam come back into the story here. They're the colonial manuscripts from the northern Yucatan, written in Yucatec Maya using the Spanish alphabet, and they're named after a priest or prophet called Chilambalam, who's said to have foretold the arrival of bearded men from the east. Several towns had their own book, and the ones from Chumail, Tizamine, and Mani are the best known. They were copied and recopied for two centuries, and the oldest surviving copies date to the 1700s. A large part of what's in them is Catoon Prophecy. The 20-year period, the Cotun, was named for the day on which it ended,

and because of the way the cycles interlock, only 13 names were possible. So the Catoons ran in a cycle of 13, which comes to about 256 years. The Chilam Balaam Books assign a prophecy to each name Catoon, and the prophecies were expected to come around again when the Catoon of that name returned. The one that gets quoted is the prophecy for the Catoon called Eleven a Howe, which the books associate with the arrival of the foreigners and the new religion. It reads, in the standard translations, as a prediction of the Spanish and the Christians. It's been cited for a hundred years as evidence that the Maya foresaw the conquest.

The problem is the date of the manuscripts. Every surviving copy was written after the conquest by people who knew it had happened. A prophecy of bearded men from the east, recorded by scribes whose grandparents had met bearded men from the east, is a very different document from a prophecy written by. before they arrived. There's no pre-conquest text of the Chilam-Ballam prophecies. Whether the Catoon 11ahal prophecy was composed before 1519, or was written afterward and folded into the cycle

so that the conquest would have a place in the calendar, isn't something the manuscripts can answer. What they do show without any doubt is that the Maya of the Yucatan were still using the Catoon cycle to organize history 200 years after Londa, and were still writing the Spanish into it. The conquest didn't end the Maya calendar. It was absorbed by it. The Spanish conquest of the Yucatan took about 20 years and was never really complete. The interior of the peninsula was never fully controlled. In 1847, Maya in the eastern Yucatan rose against the Mexican

government in what's called the caste war, and within a year they'd taken most of the peninsula. They were pushed back, but they held the east. In 1850, at a place, place they called Chan Santa Cruz, a wooden cross began to speak. The Talking Cross issued orders through interpreters, and the Maya who followed it, built a state around it, with its own army and its own capital that lasted for half a century. The Mexican army took Chan Santa Cruz in 2001. Holdouts in the forest were still fighting in the 1930s. Guatemala is worse. Between 1960 and 1996, the country fought a civil war between the military government and leftist guerrillas. In 1999, a Truth Commission established under the United Nations Peace Accords reported its findings.

About 200,000 people had been killed or disappeared. 83% of the identified victims were Maya. The commission attributed 93% of the documented killings to state forces, and it concluded that in four regions of the country, during the early 1980s, the original 1980s, the army had carried out acts of genocide against the Maya population. Villages were destroyed whole. The Ixel region in the Highlands lost a documented share of its population that the commission put at between 70 and 90 percent of some communities. In May of 2013, a Guatemalan court convicted the former head of state, Ephraian Rios Mont, of genocide and crimes against humanity for the

killings in the Ixel region during his 17 months in power. He was sentenced to 80 years. 10 days later, the country's constitutional court annulled the verdict on procedural grounds. He died in 2018 with a retrial unfinished. The thing I keep coming back to is how recent that is. The daykeepers Barbara Tedlock trained with in the 1970s were counting days through the years the commission was describing. That's where I'll end, with the count. The 260-day cycle was being kept in the highlands of Guatemala before there was a Tikal. It was being kept when Siaj Kach arrived from the west.

It was being kept the day Kaaba-Zouk pulled the rope through her tongue and the day 18 rabbit's head came off. It was being kept when the southern cities emptied and when the Spanish landed. And it was being kept on the 12th of July, 1562, in the town of Maunee, while Landa's fire burned because the daykeepers of Momostananga were counting the same sequence in the 1970s. and the sequence can't be recovered once it's lost. If the count had ever stopped, it wouldn't match the stones. And it matches the stones. Londa never mentions the daykeepers, because he was looking at the books.