I will be oh-so-sad when my Paxrat & Finchy are too big to fit in my hand any more.
![imwithkanye:
Happy Motter’s Day. [image]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3yuc72qNW1qanm80o1_500.jpg)
Oldest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Discovered
The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.
The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn’t a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.
“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future,” said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. “Numbers we can’t even wrap our heads around.”
Ha! Ten bucks says this won’t get reblogged around as much as the end of the world stuff. Thankfully, found just in time before the END of this year.
Check out the photo gallery here for an eyeball of why Mayan art looks nothing like Aztec art, as well as a peek at an actual Mayan lunar calander. Protip: It’s not a round scary looking thing.
The Mystery of Linear A.
Linear B was the writing system used in the late Bronze Age (2000- 1100BC) in Mycenaean Greece (during Agamemnon’s time) and has been successfully deciphered. It is a syllabic script as opposed to an alphabetic one, but it is still recorded in the Greek language, resembling a form of Archaic Greek. However, this form of writing disappeared in the fall of the Mycenaean civilisation.
The mystery remains with Linear A tablets, though. It appears that Linear B may have evolved from Linear A, as they share similar symbols, but Linear A does not represent the Greek language and to this day the tablets still remain undeciphered. Linear A was used in Crete between 1800-1450BC during the Minoan civilisation, used alongside Cretan hieroglyphics, which is also yet to be successfully deciphered.
