The 2012 Story by John Major Jenkins

hieroglyphic decipherment advanced by Knorosov in the 1960s. There was a key, long present, that had gone unrecognized for many years. That key, as Benjamin Whorf had proposed decades earlier, was that the glyphs were both phonetic and logo-graphic (representing a spoken word). Thompson resisted Knorosov’s work as if it heralded a Communist invasion, and the avalanche of epigraphic progress really got under way only after Thompson’s death in 1975.

WHO SAID IT’S THE CYCLE ENDING?
    All these players in the evolution of Maya studies contributed in their own ways to the key issue for the 2012 discussion: the correlation question. Despite Thompson’s confirmation of Goodman’s neglected work, the correlation question continued to tug at scholars. When ethnographic information was gathered in the 1930s and ’40s, it became apparent that the surviving 260-day count did not jibe with the proposed original GMT correlation. It was two days out of joint. Thompson took another look at the historical documents and realized that two leap days had been overlooked in the de Landa material. Thus, as of 1950 the modified GMT-2 became the final correction, which brought all the criteria into congruence.
    In 1946, elder archaeologist Sylvanus Morley published his magnum opus, The Ancient Maya . It offered a curious table as Appendix 1, in which Katun and half-Katun endings were correlated with their Gregorian equivalents. But the table ended with 12.5.0.0.0, 8 Ahau 3 Pax, April 4, 1717 AD. As with Thompson’s chart of 1927, however, the sharp reader could track the Baktun endings given and easily extrapolate that the 13th Baktun would end just about on December 23, 2012. But the entire table was calculated with the original GMT correlation. The third edition of The Ancient Maya (1956) corrected the table two days, to the new value of the GMT-2 correlation, but the table, as in the first edition, remained incomplete. Nevertheless, the table provided a convenient resource that could have been easily extended out to the cycle ending in 2012. In fact, Maya epigrapher Barbara MacLeod told me that, as a Peace Corp worker in Belize in 1973, she did just that. It wasn’t until the fourth edition of The Ancient Maya (1983) that the tables were extended out to the end of the 13-Baktun cycle: 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ahau 3 Kankin = December 21, 2012.
    By that time, Michael Coe’s 1966 book, The Maya, had already offered what was to be the first documented mention of the 13-Baktun cycle ending. But there was a problem. Although Coe knew and followed the correct GMT correlation, the date reported (December 24, 2011) was in error. It’s not exactly clear how Coe arrived at this date, especially when the reference table in Morley’s book was so easily available. Coe’s error was corrected in a later edition, but the damage was done. By 1971 other developments in the popular appreciation of the ancient calendar were astir. Tony Shearer published his poetic treatise that year, Quetzalcoatl: Lord of Dawn , in which he suggested that 1987 would be a great cycle ending prophesied by the ancient Aztecs. Soon afterward Frank Waters came out with his book on the Maya cycle ending, Mexico Mystique , using Michael Coe’s date. A watershed moment occurs here in the transmission of obscure academic machinations out into the public arena. The first wave in a growing tsunami of popular books on 2012 was about to begin.

CHAPTER TWO
    THE LONG CAREER OF THE LONG COUNT
    We can, therefore, with all good conscience hail our
“New World Hipparchus” as a creative genius in his
own right, not beholden to the ideas or ideology of
any other people or region of the world . . .
Soconusco may well have served as a bridgehead
into Mesoamerica for a variety of South American
cultural traits, but there seems little doubt that it
constituted the very “hearth,” or cradle, of the
intellectual life of indigenous North America. The
unique 260-day sacred almanac is the