Tzolkin (or tzolk'in, in the revised orthography which is now preferred) is the name bestowed by Mayanist scholars upon the version of the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar which was used by the Maya civilization. The tzolk'in is the most fundamental and widely-attested of all the Maya calendars, and was a pre-eminent component in the society and rituals of the ancient Maya. The tzolk'in calendar remains in use amongst several ...

Including:

• Tzolkin - Tzolk'in table of named days

Read more here: » Tzolkin: Encyclopedia - Tzolkin

See also:

Yuri Knorosov, Yuri Knorosov - Early life, Yuri Knorosov - Key research, Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work, Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment, Yuri Knorosov - Later life, Yuri Knorosov - List of publications

Read more here: » Yuri Knorosov: Encyclopedia II - Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment

Upon the publication of this work from a then hardly-known scholar, Knorosov and his thesis came under some severe and at times dismissive criticism. J. Eric S. Thompson, the noted British scholar regarded by all as the leading Mayanist of his day, lead the attack. Thompson's views at that time were solidly anti-phonetic, and his own large body of detailed research had already fleshed-out a view that the Maya inscriptions did not record their actual history, and that the glyphs were founded on ideographic principles. His view was the pre ...

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Yuri Knorosov, Yuri Knorosov - Early life, Yuri Knorosov - Key research, Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work, Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment, Yuri Knorosov - Later life, Yuri Knorosov - List of publications

Read more here: » Yuri Knorosov: Encyclopedia II - Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work

Why did the ancient Mayan or pre-Maya choose December 21st, 2012 A.D., as the end of their Long Count calendar? This article will cover some recent research. Scholars have known for decades that the 13-baktun cycle of the Mayan "Long Count" system of timekeeping was set to end precisely on a winter solstice, and that this system was put in place some 2300 years ago. This amazing fact - that ancient Mesoameri- can skywatchers were able to pinpoint a winter solstice far off into the future - has not been dealt with by Mayanists. And why did they choose the year 2012? One immediately gets the impression that there is a very strange mystery to be confronted here. I will be building upon a clue to this mystery reported by epigrapher Linda Schele in Maya Cosmos (1994). This article is the natural culmination of the research relating to the Mayan Long Count and the precession of the equinoxes that I explored in my recent book Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies (Borderlands Science and Research Foundation, 1994).

Read more here: » 2012: The how and why of the Mayan end date in 2012 AD

As his theories became more widely known, Knorosov was in 1956 granted leave to attend an international convention of Mesoamerican scholars in Copenhagen. This was to be his one and only venture outside the Soviet Union for quite some time, since as a Soviet academic, Knorosov was subject to the usual restrictions placed on travel outside of the Soviet Union. Over subsequent years western Mayanists needed to travel to Leningrad to meet up with him. It was not until 1990 that he was eventually able to leave Russia again and finally visit the ...

See also:

Yuri Knorosov, Yuri Knorosov - Early life, Yuri Knorosov - Key research, Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work, Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment, Yuri Knorosov - Later life, Yuri Knorosov - List of publications

Read more here: » Yuri Knorosov: Encyclopedia II - Yuri Knorosov - Later life

Mayanists have bestowed the name tzolkin (or tzolk'in, in the revised orthography which is now preferred) on the Maya version of the Mesoamerican 260-day calendar. The word was coined based on the Yucatec language, with an intended meaning of "count of days". The actual names of this calendar as used by the pre-Columbian Maya are not known. The Aztec calendar equivalent was called by them t ...

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Maya calendar, Maya calendar - General overview, Maya calendar - Maya concepts of time, Maya calendar - Tzolk'in, Maya calendar - Divination, Maya calendar - Origin of the Tzolkin, Maya calendar - Haab, Maya calendar - Wayeb, Maya calendar - Calendar Round, Maya calendar - Long Count, Maya calendar - Calculating Long Count dates, Maya calendar - Calculating the Tzolkin date portion, Maya calendar - Calculating the Haab date portion, Maya calendar - End of the world?, Maya calendar - Venus cycle

Read more here: » Maya calendar: Encyclopedia II - Maya calendar - Tzolk'in

By the 1880s, while other Mayanists fully accepted that the Maya post-dated Ancient Egypt, Le Plongeon refused to yield to the new findings. He stood by his years of field and archival studies, and challenged those he considered "armchair" archaeologists to debate the issues. But the chronology and evidence against cultural diffusion was overwhelming, and he very quickly found himself ignored, his theories condemned to the fringe of the new profession. He was never fully recognized for his work in the Yucatán, but his over five hundr ...

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Augustus Le Plongeon, Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Peru, Augustus Le Plongeon - Further research and development of theories, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Yucatán, Augustus Le Plongeon - Theories and later career, Augustus Le Plongeon - Published works

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia II - Augustus Le Plongeon - Theories and later career

Altun Ha is the name given ruins of an ancient Maya city in Belize, located in the Belize District about 30 miles (50 km) north of Belize City and about 6 miles (10 km) west of the shore of the Caribbean Sea. "Altun Ha" is a modern name in the Maya language, coined by translating the name of the nearby village of Rockstone Pond. The ancient name is at present unknown. The largest of Altun Ha's temple-pyramids, the "Temple of the Masonry Altars", is 54 feet (16 m) high. A drawing of this structure is the log ...

Read more here: » Altun Ha: Encyclopedia - Altun Ha

Augustus le Plongeon (1825-1908) was a photographer, antiquarian and amateur archaeologist who was made the first attempted excavations and photographic records of the ruins of Chichen Itza, a site of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization on the northern Yucatán peninsula, Central America. He wrote a lengthy history of Maya culture, going so far as to propose a theory that Maya had founded Ancient Egypt, a theory which has since been discredited by the scientific community. In general, his theories were considered to be somewhat outlan ...

Including:

• Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers
• Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Peru
• Augustus Le Plongeon - Further research and development of theories
• Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Yucatán
• Augustus Le Plongeon - Theories and later career
• Augustus Le Plongeon - Published works

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia - Augustus Le Plongeon

The Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) is a foundation established by Andrew Carnegie in 1902 to support scientific research. Its first president was Daniel Coit Gilman, founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School. Today the CIW supports science in six main areas: plant biology, developmental biology, global ecology, Earth and planetary sciences, and astronomy (through the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (OCIW)). One of the Institution's first grant recipients was George Hale in 1904. Hale neede ...

Including:

• Carnegie Institution of Washington - Presidents of the CIW

Read more here: » Carnegie Institution of Washington: Encyclopedia - Carnegie Institution of Washington

Jose Arguelles (b. 1939) is the New Age spiritual leader for the Planet Art Network and the Foundation for the Law of Time. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Aesthetics from the University of Chicago, and has taught at numerous colleges, including Princeton University and the San Francisco Institute of Art. He has gained notoriety for the Harmonic Convergence event, and his mystical book about the Maya calendar, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. After Mayan Factor's financial success, Jose and his wife L ...

Including:

• Jose Arguelles - Planet Art Network

Read more here: » Jose Arguelles: Encyclopedia - Jose Arguelles

Le Plongeon was born on the island of Jersey on May 4, 1825. He attended and graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. After graduation, at the age of 19, he sailed to South America and was caught in a shipwreck off the coast of Chile. While there he settled in Valparaiso and taught mathematics, drawing, and languages at a local college. In 1849, news of the California gold rush reached him, and he sailed to San Francisco to work as a surveyor, and also apprenticed to became a doctor of medicine. One of his accomplishments as a surveyor included drawing a plan for the layout of th ...

See also:

Augustus Le Plongeon, Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Peru, Augustus Le Plongeon - Further research and development of theories, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Yucatán, Augustus Le Plongeon - Theories and later career, Augustus Le Plongeon - Published works

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia II - Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers

He was born near Kharkov in the Ukraine, into an academic Russian family. As a young man, Knorosov served in the Red Army during World War II as an artillery spotter. By some accounts he took part in the final push into Berlin during May, 1945, although later sources question this. Nevertheless, the following well-known anecdote has been published, possibly as a retrospective "embellishment" to his biography: the story goes that during this exercise he and his unit passed by the National Library as it was being consumed in a blaze. Knorosov ...

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Yuri Knorosov, Yuri Knorosov - Early life, Yuri Knorosov - Key research, Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work, Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment, Yuri Knorosov - Later life, Yuri Knorosov - List of publications

Read more here: » Yuri Knorosov: Encyclopedia II - Yuri Knorosov - Early life

Sylvanus Morley - Context. When Morley and his team first arrived in 1924 to commence their excavations, Chichen Itza was an abandoned and sprawling complex of several large ruined buildings and many smaller ones, most of which lay concealed under mounds of earth and vegetation. Some areas of the site had previously been surveyed, photographed and documented independently in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by highly-regarded authorities such as Teoberto Maler, Alfred Maudslay and Eduard Seler, who although ...

See also:

Sylvanus Morley, Sylvanus Morley - Early life, Sylvanus Morley - First expeditions and espionage work, Sylvanus Morley - Carnegie Institution and Chichen Itza proposal, Sylvanus Morley - Fieldwork in Mexico and Central America, Sylvanus Morley - Influences on other scholars, Sylvanus Morley - Eric Thompson, Sylvanus Morley - Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Sylvanus Morley - Excavations at Chichen Itza, Sylvanus Morley - Context, Sylvanus Morley - Major finds, Sylvanus Morley - Result summary, Sylvanus Morley - Project completion and final years, Sylvanus Morley - Theories and retrospective assessment, Sylvanus Morley - Views on ancient Maya society, Sylvanus Morley - Maya writing, Sylvanus Morley - Archaeology, Sylvanus Morley - Summation, Sylvanus Morley - Publications, Sylvanus Morley - The other Sylvanus G. Morley

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Excavations at Chichen Itza

The tzolk'in calendar combines a cycle of twenty named days with another cycle of thirteen numbers (the trecena), to produce 260 unique days (i.e., 20 × 13 = 260). Each successive named day was numbered from 1 up to 13 and then starting again at 1. There were 20 individual named days, as shown in the table below: NOTES: 1. the sequence number of the named day in the Tzolk'in calendar 2. Day name, in the standardised and revised orthography of the Guatemalan Academia de Lenguas Mayas 3. See also:

Tzolkin, Tzolkin - Tzolk'in table of named days

Read more here: » Tzolkin: Encyclopedia II - Tzolkin - Tzolk'in table of named days

After almost twenty years, Carnegie's Chichen Itza project wound to a close in 1940, its restorative and investigative work complete and its objectives substantially met. Morley returned to the United States to take up directorships in the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico. He also started work on a large-scale work on ancient Maya society, which he completed and published in 1946. This was to be one of his more successful works (outside of his popular writings in maga ...

See also:

Sylvanus Morley, Sylvanus Morley - Early life, Sylvanus Morley - First expeditions and espionage work, Sylvanus Morley - Carnegie Institution and Chichen Itza proposal, Sylvanus Morley - Fieldwork in Mexico and Central America, Sylvanus Morley - Influences on other scholars, Sylvanus Morley - Eric Thompson, Sylvanus Morley - Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Sylvanus Morley - Excavations at Chichen Itza, Sylvanus Morley - Context, Sylvanus Morley - Major finds, Sylvanus Morley - Result summary, Sylvanus Morley - Project completion and final years, Sylvanus Morley - Theories and retrospective assessment, Sylvanus Morley - Views on ancient Maya society, Sylvanus Morley - Maya writing, Sylvanus Morley - Archaeology, Sylvanus Morley - Summation, Sylvanus Morley - Publications, Sylvanus Morley - The other Sylvanus G. Morley

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Project completion and final years

In his day, Sylvanus Morley was widely regarded as one of the leading figures in Maya scholarship, in authority perhaps second only to Eric Thompson, whose views he mostly shared. From the late 1920s through to perhaps the mid-1970s, the reconstruction of ancient Maya society and history pieced together by Morley, Thompson and others constituted the "standard" interpretation against which competing views had to be measured. However, major advances made in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing and refinements in archaeological data wh ...

See also:

Sylvanus Morley, Sylvanus Morley - Early life, Sylvanus Morley - First expeditions and espionage work, Sylvanus Morley - Carnegie Institution and Chichen Itza proposal, Sylvanus Morley - Fieldwork in Mexico and Central America, Sylvanus Morley - Influences on other scholars, Sylvanus Morley - Eric Thompson, Sylvanus Morley - Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Sylvanus Morley - Excavations at Chichen Itza, Sylvanus Morley - Context, Sylvanus Morley - Major finds, Sylvanus Morley - Result summary, Sylvanus Morley - Project completion and final years, Sylvanus Morley - Theories and retrospective assessment, Sylvanus Morley - Views on ancient Maya society, Sylvanus Morley - Maya writing, Sylvanus Morley - Archaeology, Sylvanus Morley - Summation, Sylvanus Morley - Publications, Sylvanus Morley - The other Sylvanus G. Morley

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Theories and retrospective assessment

Morley's publications include: 1915- An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs 1920- The Inscriptions of Copán 1938- The Inscriptions of Petén (5 vols.) 1946- The Ancient Maya (revised 3rd ed. issued in 1956 by G. W. Brainerd) In addition to his scholarly work, Morley thought it important to share his enthusiasm for the ancient Maya with the general public. He wrote a popular series of articles about the Maya and various Maya sites in the National G ...

See also:

Sylvanus Morley, Sylvanus Morley - Early life, Sylvanus Morley - First expeditions and espionage work, Sylvanus Morley - Carnegie Institution and Chichen Itza proposal, Sylvanus Morley - Fieldwork in Mexico and Central America, Sylvanus Morley - Influences on other scholars, Sylvanus Morley - Eric Thompson, Sylvanus Morley - Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Sylvanus Morley - Excavations at Chichen Itza, Sylvanus Morley - Context, Sylvanus Morley - Major finds, Sylvanus Morley - Result summary, Sylvanus Morley - Project completion and final years, Sylvanus Morley - Theories and retrospective assessment, Sylvanus Morley - Views on ancient Maya society, Sylvanus Morley - Maya writing, Sylvanus Morley - Archaeology, Sylvanus Morley - Summation, Sylvanus Morley - Publications, Sylvanus Morley - The other Sylvanus G. Morley

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Publications

In 1952 Knorosov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki, or "Ancient Writing of Central America".) The general thesis of this paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform which were generally or formerly thought to be predominantly logographic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than the symbols representing only or mainly wh ...

See also:

Yuri Knorosov, Yuri Knorosov - Early life, Yuri Knorosov - Key research, Yuri Knorosov - Critical reactions to his work, Yuri Knorosov - Progress of decipherment, Yuri Knorosov - Later life, Yuri Knorosov - List of publications

Read more here: » Yuri Knorosov: Encyclopedia II - Yuri Knorosov - Key research

In 1873, the le Plongeons traveled to Yucatán, and remained there almost continuously until 1885 in search of cultural connections between the Maya and Ancient Egypt. They used photography to record what they considered evidence of those connections, but also attempted a thorough photographic record of the sites as a basis for future general research. Their photographic work was methodical and systematic, and they took hundreds of 3-D photos. They documented entire Maya buildings such as the 'Governor's Palace' at Uxmal in overlappin ...

See also:

Augustus Le Plongeon, Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Peru, Augustus Le Plongeon - Further research and development of theories, Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Yucatán, Augustus Le Plongeon - Theories and later career, Augustus Le Plongeon - Published works

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia II - Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Yucatán