The Ancients - Ancient Americas: Debunking The Maya Apocalypse

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

One of the most famous, and sophisticated, cultures of Mesoamerica, why are the Maya known only for predicting the end of the world?In the first episode of our new mini series 'The Ancient Americas', Tristan is joined by Professor Matthew Restall from Penn State University to help debunk the idea of a Maya Apocalypse. Together, Tristan and Matthew take a look at where this idea of an apocalypse originated from, and why our modern conceptions of the Maya calendar are incorrect. A civilisation known for it's mathematical advancements, beautifully coloured buildings, and with Maya peoples still alive today - there's more to the Maya than we know.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, I'm really excited for this episode because we're kicking off a new series going across August and hopefully beyond too, all about the ancient Americas. We're going to be talking about Mesoamerica, South America, and hopefully an episode or two on ancient North America as well.

And to kick it all off, we were delighted to get on the podcast at very short notice, so we're incredibly grateful to him fitting us into his very busy schedule, we got on the podcast Professor Matthew Restle from Penn State University. Matthew came on the pod to talk all about the Maya. Now, talking all about the Maya in one podcast is not possible, so we're focusing in here especially on the Maya calendar, what this was, the various versions of the calendar which they had, and of course we're going to be talking about the calendar which referred to 2012 as being the end. But did the Maya believe that there was going to be an apocalypse at this time? Did they think there was going to be Armageddon as has been commonly perceived in recent history?

Or did they think something else? Well, Matthew brilliantly sorts fact from fiction on all of this, and I know you're going to absolutely love this episode. And so without further ado, to talk all about the Maya, calendars, and the proposed apocalypse, here's Matthew. Matthew, it's great to have you on the podcast today. It's nice to be here. Thank you for having me. You're more than welcome and I'm incredibly grateful for you doing it, especially at such short notice. And I know you're incredibly busy at the moment.

And to talk about the Maya and in particular the Maya calendars, because it almost seems as if this part of the Maya, Matthew, is it fair to say today perhaps it's one of the most talked about parts of their legacy? Yes, I think it is. And I think for an unfortunate reason, probably what you're thinking of, Tristan, is the belief about a decade ago that the Maya had predicted that the world was going to end in 2012. And so obviously, it did not. Some people think it sort of still is slowly ending, but they've given up blaming the Maya for that. But I think that there's still kind of a lingering interest in the Maya calendar as a result. And a lot of that is to do with not simply ignorance about the Maya calendar, but a larger ignorance about the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. And very often the image that comes to mind when you think of the Maya calendar is

actually an Aztec image, not a Maya image. Well, we're going to delve into all of that, as you say, so thank you for highlighting that straight away. But a few background questions to kick this all off. I mean, first off, who were the Maya, Matthew? Just to start with this nice, easy, short question. Why don't you, Tristan? Well, the first thing I always say in response to that question is the Maya still are. So one of the great misconceptions about the Maya is that the Maya were a civilization that long ago disappeared. And it's easy to get that impression if you're one of the few people who have the privilege of traveling down and visiting ancient Maya cities. And what you see is, you know, old stone buildings

with no sign of anyone having lived in them for many hundreds of years. And it reinforces this idea of an ancient lost civilization. What happened to them? Where did all the people go? It's this great mystery. And all of that is a big kind of misconception and misunderstanding. First of all, the Maya are still with us. So the Maya is a civilization that goes back thousands of years. And it persists to this day and obviously has changed over time, particularly the last 500 years as a result of Europeans coming to the Americas and settling in Maya lands. And then those Europeans then leaving their colonies and those colonies turning into modern nations, none of which are defined as Maya modern nations,

so that the Maya area is carved up by different nations. And those colonies weren't even all Spanish colonies. One of them was eventually a British colony. So that's the first thing I always say, is the Mayas still are with us, which you don't really want to hear. What you really want to hear when you ask that question is, oh, the Maya was an ancient civilization

that created an incredible writing system that had astonishing mathematical knowledge and understanding of planetary movements. In other words, they had this very sophisticated grasp of how the universe functions, our place in the universe the passage of time how to build cities with beautiful artwork and the more the more we kind of look into those aspects of the maya which totally fascinates us the more we end up going back into the earlier part of the question which is well where is all that stuff now what happened to them and well going off that then matthew it almost feels as if these it's it was good that

you explained that straight off the bat because it almost feels as if he had this there is this misconception as you highlighted there and i guess kind of keeping on that trend before keeping on with what you were saying there i mean talk to us about the misconception that sometimes we get with the word Maya compared to the word Mayan, because this seems to be quite a big differentiation too. Yes, I mean, it's a trivial thing, but it's something that Maya scholars take seriously, that as soon as you see the Mayans with an N, it's kind of a signal that that's not someone who's a Maya scholar or a Mayanist. It's not someone who studies the Maya. That's sort of the popular way of looking at it.

Mayan scholars use for the language or languages because there are dozens of different Mayan languages. It's not even clear how many at one point there were, but there are about 30 that are still spoken today. Obviously, many of them are endangered and are in danger of disappearing. But the main Mayan languages like Yucatec, Mayan, Cachiquel and Quiche Mayan from Guatemala are spoken by millions of people in Guatemala, Mexico and in the Mayan, the Mayan, I just said it right? The Maya diaspora, mostly in the United States and in Canada, but in other countries as well. So the Maya is the proper way of referring to Maya peoples. And you didn't ask this, but I'll throw this in anyway. We made up that word. So Maya is a

Yucatec Maya word. It's not clear exactly its origins and what it initially referred to. Going back 500 years, it seems as if it just referred to one particular part of the Yucatan Peninsula and the people who lived in that particular region. But it is us, modern peoples, who have used the term to create a civilizational area that encompasses what we call the Maya peoples. They never had a sense of common identity. They were never united in a political empire. They never saw themselves all as one people as opposed to non-Maya peoples who live to the north and south of them. So we have kind of an imposed identity on them, which in the modern period,

Maya peoples themselves have been embraced. And in the 20th century, in response to discrimination against Maya peoples, particularly in Guatemala, but also in Mexico, to some extent in Belize and Honduras, a pan-Maya movement was created. And that was

created by Maya peoples, right, to sort of say, okay, you assign this identity to us, and now we're going to use it to pursue our rights and defend ourselves. So why, therefore, does this word Maya come about to encompass all of these peoples who, as you say, cover such a huge geographic area and i'm presuming these peoples you know it said they would perhaps seen themselves as being quite you know different from each other with different centers different communities perhaps different ways of uh ruling and so on i mean how does the name maya therefore come about if they didn't refer to it yeah i see i think what you're really asking just to correct me I'm wrong, is how do you know if someone is a Maya person or not?

How do you know they're Maya and not say Nahua? So the Nahua or Nahua speakers, an ethnic group to the north and west of the Maya and often popularly called Aztecs. So how do you know when you've sort of crossed that line? I mean, the line would have been kind of a blurred one, but scholars debated and continue to debate and discuss what that means, Maya, and that ends up being part of the whole field of Maya studies, right? You get a room full of Mayanists, art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians to talk about what Maya means and how you define it. You've got, you know, days and days and days and days of scholars discussing things like how we classify languages. So where a particular Mayan language is a Mayan language

and not a Mayan language. So the linguists would have their say, and they'd say, yep, here's a boundary. And that includes this whole area, Yucatan, Guatemala, there's the boundary. Art historians would say, well, it's about artistic styles and modes of expression. And that more or less locks in with language. including most significantly a tradition that dies out in the Maya area by the around the time Europeans arrive but it's really important for many hundreds of years and that is a tradition of divine kings and queens so there's a whole rulership system that is manifested in architecture in art in political structures social social structures. When people know a little bit about the Maya, maybe they've been to the British Museum and there's that Mexico room in the British Museum where there's some classic Maya stone sculptures that were taken from Guatemala a long time ago. And they see those, that's what they think of. They think of Maya kings with

elaborate headdresses and glyphs, identifying who they were, and maybe they're performing some kind of self-sacrificial ritual where they're bleeding, cutting themselves to put blood on a piece of sacred paper, that sort of thing. So sure, you find sacred kings all over the world. I mean, you know, the divine right of kings in Britain, for example. But there's something very specific about the way that culture develops in the Maya area, particularly in northern Guatemala, but in other parts of the Maya area that help us to define who the Maya were and who they were not? That's a great question. I mean, as I say, it's like, you know, we could sit around for a week and get all these other scholars in and debate that endlessly. And where people disagree is where kind of the fun starts, right?

I mean, no, absolutely. And I'm glad you asked that question, you know, from my rambling there. And I really do appreciate that, Matthew. And I think from what you're saying there, and this might seem obvious as a Joe Bloggs to say, but obviously with the Maya, as it's such a long stretching area, people, I mean, civilization as it's now been termed, and as you say, going down to the present day, is it always quite hard to talk about the Maya, for instance, because if we're talking about the Maya 2000 years ago, the Maya back then, I'm presuming you can see some very significant differences between the maya then and let's say the maya nearer the time of the aztecs nearer the time of people coming in like post a thousand a.d yeah yeah absolutely and it's the same thinking about history of britain and you know think about who the people were at the time of stonehenge and then who they are in the medieval period. And even up to today, we just sort of take for granted, of course, it's the same people, but it's also completely different all at the same time. Right. And we kind of instinctively get how that works.

But then we imagine if we look at another society or another region, somehow it's going to be completely different. region somehow it's going to be completely different and we would we love to seize on the ways in which they were different without accepting that if we were to go back in time the differences that we would find and be struck by would be more question of time and not region just does that does that do you see what i'm saying absolutely yeah when i yeah when i talk to students i say you know before we do that let's that, let's just say we're in England, right? Not in the United States. So let's go back to England in the year 1000 and spend a few weeks there. It would not be fun, by the way, but let's do that.

And then we'll go to a Maya city in the year 1000. And that will help us to see like, okay, now I see how human beings in the year 1000 all over the world lived a certain way. They had certain kinds of technologies and so on. And I always make the argument that I think if you then had a choice, you're now stuck back in the year 1000. Where do you want to be? Everyone would choose to be in a Maya city, but that might just mean a kind of romantic bias on my part. I mean, they got better food just to start with they've got like you know all kinds of different squash and amazing fish and they're not walking around

eating raw onions like the english are but that might just be my my romanticism as i said well you you go through i mean it's a bit too far in the future for us ancients i'm afraid i mean that's going for the medieval times i'm in the podcast but let's go a bit further back in time therefore let's talk about the maya i've got notes such as the classic period here and perhaps even a bit before that so maybe like a couple of thousand years ago matthew around that time i know it's another big question but i'm hoping you can explain like what would a maya city look like what are some of the things that like some of the most extraordinary elements of the maya civilization let's say in around the year zero or the first millennium bc yeah that it gets harder when you go back like that right because we know less

and partly we know less because the maya have tended to settle sites and stay in those sites for thousands of years. Despite the fact that when we go there now, we see all these ruined cities. And then when I say, but there's still millions of Maya, where are they? Well, they're over there. They're not living in the same. It seems like they constantly moved around. But in the larger scale of things, there are sites that are in, you know, northern Guatemala and Belize, so on, which we know were settled continuously for thousands of years. And what that means is that the earlier cities are buried underneath the later ones. Now, archaeologists have developed incredible skills, particularly over the last 50 years, at essentially burrowing through those layers without destroying things or absolute minimal amounts of destruction in order to find the smaller structures underneath.

And this is kind of an oversimplification. I think archaeologists would not like me saying this very much, but the cities are very similar. They're just smaller in scale. So if you want to go back 2,000 years, are you going to see massive pyramids? Not so much, but you are going to see stone structures. You'll see pyramids with temples on top. round squares or plazas, oriented in a particular way that oriented towards the movement of the planets and the rising and falling and setting of the sun, oriented around where water's sources of water are and so on.

So stone structures go back way, way earlier than we've at first thought or that scholars first thought. I think Maya writing goes back earlier than was first thought. So if first thought. I think Maya writing goes back earlier than was first thought. So if you want to go back to the year zero, there was a time when it was believed that hieroglyphic writing systems had not yet developed. And now we know that they had already developed, not as much as they do later, but they're already there, including numbers. So there's also mathematical knowledge that is being written down.

And obviously written down on all kinds of media that have not survived, right? But yeah, paper and bone and so on, and on cloth. So what we have is just the stone parts left, and those have not survived as well as they have from a thousand years ago. And then the last thing I'll say is I think what would really strike us going back is color. When you go to Maya cities today, there's no color. And that's a hard one to kind of explain to people. You've really got to use your imagination.

These stone, gray stone buildings, crumbling and so on, would have been faced in stucco white stucco and then painted so maya cities even going back it's kind of to the early days of the maya as the maya kind of coming into to being as a civilization there where they lived and worked would have been places of color and art and matthew that's such a good point to leave it on there because it's i think it's such an important one to stress wherever you are in the ancient world whether it's an ancient egyptian temple you know classical greece and rome you always think the white but actually it's much more it's always colored or neolithic orcney

there's evidence of color pigments there too or as you say in mesoamerica with the maya as you say there and i think i just want to repeat that because it's such an important point to stress that there would have been color everywhere these would be very vibrant communities with all these different well shades of color everywhere you looked oh yeah absolutely and you know i sort of in a way i blame photography this is sounds sounds like an idiotic thing to say, but with the history of photography being the world looked like it was black and white in the past and then it became color.

Maybe that just betrays my generation. I'm older than you, Tristan. I think my kids don't have that same kind of association because you can't get them to watch black and white movies anyway, right? But I think in my generation, it's this kind of idea as a kid, oh, the world used to be black and white. It used to be monochrome. my generation it's this kind of idea as a kid oh the world used to

be black and white it used to be monochrome and now it's color and in some ways it's the other way around i mean absolutely absolutely well let's go on from there i could ask so many different questions because the mara is such a huge topic but you did mention their mathematics and i think that's a nice kind of lead into talking more about the calendar because from what you were saying matthew so the maya they were big into maths were they they were we know that they were quite well interested in mathematics yes they were absolutely fascinated by numbers and by the passage of time and by the connection between the movement of planets and the sun and the moon and our own planet and how that connects to time. They were an agricultural society, of course, like all societies were in the world. And therefore, that would have been kind of the origins of their fascination. But they really

took it to a whole other kind of level and developed a calendar that was extremely complex and had multiple layers and levels to it. Now, is it more complex than our calendar? Okay, so Minus will argue about this. I know MySkulls will say, yes, absolutely it was and this is why. But if you try and explain this, say, to undergrad students and say, well, tell me what day it is today they will start giving you the day in multiple calendrical cycles right the week the month the year and so on and they'll realize oh okay i guess i do live in a system in which we you know i have grasped a complex calendar so okay the my one was the, except the numbers are slightly different. Right. It's like you've got 20, 20 day months and a 360 day annual cycle and so on. And that larger counts of centuries and and thousands of years or millennia were different and much bigger because they had a vigesimal counting system, not a decimal counting system.

So that automatically means that larger numbers, you know, become bigger. And they had also worked out these calculations to trying to figure out how old the universe was. And they had come up with a massive, massive sum that goes back billions of years, which is actually not that far off what modern scholars of that kind of thing will tell us, right? And that big cycle then goes all the way forward as well, and then reboots itself just like our centuries and millennia do. It happened to be that in 2012, in December 2012, a long count of several thousands of years, over 4,000 years, reboots itself in the Maya calendar. That doesn't mean to say that the world was going to end. They were not. The whole point of calendrics for the Maya was not to try and figure out when the world was going to end.

It was to better understand how the world functioned. There was something positive, not negative about it. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffeeoms coffee plastic surgery warships over on the patented podcast by history hit we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own we uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects we managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain.

Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time. Can only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile

is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. I mean, that's literally what I was going to ask up next before going more into that 2012 area was to stick a bit more on the origins and me asking the really difficult questions but like do we have any rough idea when my calendars start coming about and why from what you were hinting at there is it more for instance is it more an astronomical interest in the universe purpose or do we think it perhaps might be more aligned with what's having like ancient rome like more focused on agriculture yeah it's both it's it's all of those

things right because they have because the calendars function at different levels so just like us there's a calendar that's very much oriented to the year and so therefore to agricultural cycles, summer and winter and so on. There's calendars that are more oriented to a longer span, which corresponds more or less to the human lifespan. Right. That's obvious, too. There are larger ones where there's a kind of an awareness that there are certain events that take place, human events, natural events that don't fit into those two things. And there's maybe some unpredictability to it. Right. events that take place, human events, natural events that don't fit into those two things. And there's maybe some unpredictability to it, right? Like periods of drought, you know, you're in an area of hurricanes, for example, and earthquakes, like when do things, they try and figure out how, if it's possible to predict when things like that happen as well. And they, and

they discover as much as we do that that's not they're not completely predictable so it's about agricultural cycles but it's also about an understanding of kind of really big questions right looking up into the night sky and go okay what is going on here there's constant movement this is not a static system this is a dynamic system the time does not stop stop. It keeps going on and on and on. So what does that mean? And how do we kind of fit into that and better understand it? But your question about when it all begins, we don't know. So if you take that date that ended in 2012, and then that calendar that began again, which in the Maya calendar is not 2012, it's 13 with a whole bunch of zeros after it. So you can count that back as the Maya

did to a kind of a beginning date. And that's over 4000 years earlier. And it's extremely unlikely. I think all Maya scholars would believe it's extremely unlikely that at that date, Mayas sat around and came up with the calendar, right? That was kind of, that's backdated. Like our calendar, look, the year's 2022. Did everybody sit around in the year zero and say, let's start the calendar now? No, right? That almost never happens. So this is a knowledge that gradually evolved and developed back in that period, which is a pretty dynamic period in terms of Maya scholarship. I think Maya archaeologists are really learning a lot more about that time period every single year. But it's the one that you're kind of interested in, you're referring to, Tristan,

that going back 2,000 years, 2,500 years, right back there. Absolutely, Matthew. And it's, I mean, it is so interesting. And it's always a difficult question, you know, when we think things like that come about. But it seems like also we do know a lot about these calendars and these various types of calendars which we will get into. My next question, therefore, is how do we know one of the most extraordinary scripts in human history. And people who studied, of course, you become very enamored of it, right? an epigrapher. So my specialty is not reading Maya glyphs. So I'm sort of in that place, not one of those guys, but I'm also not someone who, you know, knows nothing about Maya glyphs and so on. I work with Maya language texts written alphabetically in the colonial period. So I have, I think, some objectivity, at least I would claim that. And I have to say, objectivity, at least I would claim that. And I have to say, it's a spectacular system. It's not only is it very complex in how it is able to convey specific words, concepts, it has pictographic elements to it, it has syllabic elements to it, you know, like our alphabet. So it's very complex

and sophisticated. And there's nothing you cannot convey in it. You could, you know, translate a Shakespeare play into my hieroglyphs. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before somebody does that. I hope so. But it's also beautiful. As a piece of script, it's spectacular. A piece of alphabetic script does not even come close to comparing. In fact, I would say our alphabet is probably the most least beautiful

looking script. I mean, East Asian script are more beautiful to look at, but none of them compare to my hieroglyphs, particularly as glyphic texts often on paper or on stone would also have been colored as well. Because the glyphic texts contain calendrical information, glyphically written and also numerically, and also figuratively as well, because the really complex religious system of hundreds and hundreds of deities. So the deities weren't discrete, right? It wasn't like, well, that's it wasn't like the classical system, like that's this god of that. And then that's the god of this, we talk about the Tlaloc being the god of rain, and so on, we simplify it for us to be able to follow it, but it's very complex. And each deity had different aspects, could have multiple aspects that related to gender, direction,

you know, all kinds of other concepts, colors, and so on. So that religious system is connected to the calendrical system. And that's part of what this mind-boggling work that epigraphers and art historians and linguists and so on have been working on for the last 50 years is trying to figure out what the Mayaaglyphs said and in the course of figuring that out they discover all these things about my political systems and about my calendrics and going on from that i wish i could ask more about it but i might not just have enough time but if we're going you know figuring out what they're saying from looking at these mayaglyphs what has this therefore revealed about

let's say the particular calendar which they thought you know there was going to be an ending in 2012 what has the literature what has the source material revealed about the nature of this particular maya calendar i think what it revealed is a huge disconnect between the kind of popular perception and fear and what Maya scholars' understanding of the calendar. There was more or less a consensus among Mayanists that the Maya were not obsessed with apocalypse or with world ending, you know, but maybe they might have wondered about what was going to happen and so on. Well, when there was this then larger perception and a whole industry of 2012-ology, as it became called,

trying to convince people, look out, the world's going to end, and the Maya predicted it, that forced Mayanists to say, okay, let's be more clear, let's be more detailed, let's be more thorough in trying to understand Maya calendrics. And I think that then pushed Mayanists even more to say, this is not a civilization that was obsessed with apocalypse at all. For them, these huge expanses of time were not about endings, they were about beginnings, they were about persistence and continuity, not about destruction and the end. And that sort of helps us to think about

Maya life in kind of different ways, right? As being something that they assumed and imagined had lasted for a really, really long time and will continue to last for a really, really long time. And I think if they were to come forward in our imaginary time machine, they would be surprised at how obsessed we are with the end of the world. Like, where does that come from? And of course, that does where it's come from. It's a Western civilization theme. It goes back thousands of years in our civilization to the Mediterranean world.

And it's us that brought this idea into Maya culture. We implanted that in Maya civilization, but it's really us that's obsessed with the apocalypse. That's rooted in Judeo-Christian culture, right? So it's Judaism and Christianity going way back. Europe and becomes more intense during the medieval period in the face of endless rounds of plagues and pandemics, right? People trying to make sense of why is this happening to humanity? Those people then travel to the New World to convert indigenous peoples, including the Maya, and they are absolutely obsessed with the notion of the apocalypse and with the second coming and believe that if they the christ will come very soon if they can convert all native peoples to christianity including the maya so they are literally implanting the notion of the apocalypse into maya civilization right how that's so interesting indeed so actually in regards to

the maya perspective this date of, do we think it was more, therefore, if you're looking at the source material, more of just the end of a cycle, a resetting? There is, as you say, no association with apocalypse, with the world ending on this date. No, exactly. It's like Y2K, or less so, right? Because we were worried that computers would cause the world to end or something.

You know, if Europeans had not come to the Maya world and the Maya world had continued isolated from Europe all the way through to 2012, who knows what would have happened. But there's no evidence that they would have been wringing their hands expecting the world to end. What the evidence is that there would have been a lot of very elaborate rituals marking the passage of time and focused on rebirth, not end. Because it's the moment the cycle ends, it restarts. It's like the, you know, the odometer on your car. There's no like stop and then that's it. The number turns over

and you've already begun the next cycle immediately. So I think that's what we would have, I can't know for sure, but I think that's what we would have found. It's kind of celebration of a beginning. That's super interesting. And you know what? I have no regrets about going outside of ancient history to ask that question. We do legacy of stuff sometimes. And there's a great example of that, too. I mean, I'd like to ask a couple of more questions before we wrap up completely. And also the fact that obviously we've just focused on that particular calendar, but there are other calendars too from Maya times.

What other sorts of calendar were there from the Maya? Focus around what sorts of areas? Are there any particular examples which are really good to highlight here that it's not just the 2012 calendar yeah i mean the 2012 one is usually called the long count and it's you know it's an era of 13 cycles of 400 years right so that's kind of the scale that that we're talking about but the shorter ones are the smaller ones are more like our year and with 20 day months. And those track things like the movements. There's a Venus calendar that tracks the movements of Venus.

There are other time cycles that relate to the human gestation period and so on. So it kind of it goes from the great cosmic ideas and scale all the way down to something that's very that's very human and ties into daily life. It's that multifunctional purpose, isn't it? And it's it's also another thing I like to ask around that is. And once again, it might seem quite an obvious question, but I remember doing a podcast a few months back about the emergence of the Julian calendar with Julius Caesar and the creation of a fixed calendar at that time. With the Maya, are all of their calendars, are they fixed? Or do we have any idea whether some could, you know, potentially dates could be moved around like we do have evidence of happening in the ancient Mediterranean world? Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm not sure I can answer that in detail. I know there has been some discussion of that, that it was assumed that these were all fixed and that there

was no crisis point at any moment where there was a resetting. I might be wrong, but I believe that some scholars think that there may have been moments when a resetting was done possibly for political reasons. So in order to make the moment when a certain individual became king, or when he was born, or when his father or ancestors became rulers of that particular city state, that that was a date that was numerically or numerologically was more significant. And that might have caused some kind of calendrical shifts. I think the problem with that argument is that the Maya were not all united in a single empire. So when we're talking about resetting the calendar in Roman times or in the medieval Europe, there's a religious sort of unification before, right, of Christendom before the Reformation.

So a decision like that can be made and once the papacy has sort of approved of the decision, then it works its way down. And there's no such centralization in the Maya world at all. its way down and there's no such centralization in the Maya world at all. If one city state is changing the calendar, then scholars are going to see a disconnect between their calendar and the calendar in other city states. So the argument therefore would be that no, unless you can find really specific moment where that happens, then it's not going to. Fair enough. I'm just full of incredibly difficult questions today. These are good. If you keep going, you're going to have a question I can't even say a single thing about. So is that your goal, Tristan? To push me to the edge of my knowledge? That's what I do. OK, only a couple of questions and we'll wrap up.

But I mean, that was a really nice thing what you were saying there. You know how, you know, it's not just there are these different peoples. It's not one big group and with the Maya and let's say keep on it maybe 2000 1500 years ago do we think therefore it's possible that if that's the case that the Maya calendar was actually being used outside of the area we refer to as the Maya world as well at that time my god you you are really like that's an excellent question I'm now I'm going to want to go ask my colleagues now about that question i mean i'm guessing that the calendar would have been known about but the

thing is is you move out of the my era up into mexico through what is now oaxaca where the mish tech and zapotec peoples had their own writing system and calendrical knowledge. And then up into central Mexico where, well, the Aztecs, but the people who came before going back hundreds and thousands of years, their predecessors, they had their own writing system too. And they're related, but they're not the same. The Maya are part of a larger cultural area or civilizational area that you mentioned earlier, Mesoamerica, which goes from northern Mexico down into Central America. So I think probably I'm like thinking of on my feet about this question. I think the calendar would have been used outside the Maya

area, but it wouldn't have quite been the same calendar. But they would have been perfectly comprehensible, right? I mean, there would have been a language difference. The different words would be used, maybe that one calendar is more important than the other and so on. The long count, the really big one, was not recorded outside the Maya area. So it probably was known about on the edges of the Maya area, and possibly in central Mexico, they were aware of that, but they didn't use it. Fair enough. Good answer, my friend. And well, this has been absolutely great. A bit squirrelly. It was a bit of a politician's answer. Well, I mean, that's all we want. It's all good at the moment. And like, that was great. And this has been an awesome chat, Matthew.

And we've got to wrap it up now. But last and certainly not least, I mean, if there was one thing, apart from me asking all these incredibly difficult questions, that you wanted people to take away from this chat today, I mean, what would it be? Don't forget the Maya are still with us. Their civilization still exists. Maya people are still among us.

Think about that. It's important. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Matthew, this has been a great chat. Last, but certainly not least, you've written books on the Maya and one of your most recent is called? The Maya, A Very Short Introduction, written in the brilliant Oxford series, The Very Short Introduction series. Brilliant. Well, it just goes for me to say, Matthew, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thanks for the opportunity. Enjoyed talking to you. Thanks, Chris. Well, there you go. There was Professor Matthew Restle explaining all about the Maya calendar 2012 and whether these people did believe

in an apocalypse happening on that date. It was great to get Matthew on the podcast at such short notice. We're incredibly grateful to him for fitting us in to his very busy schedule. And it's also been a very quick turnaround by the whole Ancients team, particularly our producers Elena and Annie. So huge kudos, huge praise to them for getting this episode edited and ready for this Sunday's release now last things from me you've heard it before you're going to hear it again you know what the drill is by now if you would like more ancients content in the meantime where you know what you can do you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below every week I write a bit of a blurb for that newsletter where we explain what's been happening

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