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January 21, 2012

“Who the heck were the Maya?”

The way in which this oddball civilization is accorded undue respect, especially this year,
shows that our own ruling and academic elites have chosen to distort the internal workings of their own brains as much as the Maya elite distorted the outer carapaces of theirs. The cosmic predictions of a semi-barbaric civilization that didn’t even know what a wheel was and which disappeared back into the jungles that spawned it after a period of pointless pyramid proliferation and skull bending should merit slightly less attention than the palm readings of the average faux-gypsy. --World Without End

Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 21, 2012 10:55 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

I hate to spoil the party, but the Mayans didn't predict the end of anything in 2012 A.D. other than the present (13th) "Baktun" or 144,000 day period that roughly corresponds to one of our centuries. All of the hype about the end of the world is New Ager bullshit and does not derive from any Mayan source.

Posted by: Gandalin at January 21, 2012 12:38 PM

The Maya did not disappear back into the jungle. they still live where they have always lived in Central America.

They did not predict anything related to the end of the long count calendar cycle, which predated them. Although they apparently had a cyclical idea of history quite in common with many other peoples such as the Hindus and the Greeks.

Their pre-Columbian accomplishments which include a writing system which was unique in the Americas and a mathematics that was based on a positional notation with a zero, and was adequate to calculate many excellent astronomical tables.

Posted by: Fat Man at January 21, 2012 8:54 PM

The modern Maya are very warm, polite people, especially in contrast to their rude, crude Latino neighbors. Their ancestors created some great tourist attractions.

Posted by: Gary Ogletree at January 22, 2012 5:00 PM

I've known of the Mayans since I was a schoolboy, and a very young one at that, since I took it upon myself to read about them. I also found out later that they could be quite savage in certain ways, and I also know that today's Mayans are the inheritors of a failed civilization.

They lived, they did some remarkable things, and then they faded. We, despite the strenuously malignant efforts of our "betters," have not yet faded, which is why we're commenting on this failed civilization now.

Posted by: Don Rodrigo at January 24, 2012 10:41 AM

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