Page 166 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Western intellectuals abandoned Bishop Usher’s opinion that the world
was created in 4004 BC and accepted that it must be infinitely older than
that. In plain English this means that the ancient Maya had a far more
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accurate understanding of the true immensity of geological time, and of
the vast antiquity of our planet, than did anyone in Britain, Europe or
North America until Darwin propounded the theory of evolution.
So how come the Maya got handy with big periods like hundreds of
millions of years? Was it a freak of cultural development? Or did they
inherit the calendrical and mathematical tools which facilitated, and
enabled them to develop, this sophisticated understanding? If an
inheritance was involved, it is legitimate to ask what the original
inventors of the Mayan calendar’s computer-like circuitry had intended it
to do. What had they designed it for? Had they simply conceived of all its
complexities to concoct ‘a challenge to the intellect, a sort of tremendous
anagram’, as one authority claimed? Or could they have had a more
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pragmatic and important objective in mind?
We have seen that the obsessive concern of Mayan society, and indeed
of all the ancient cultures of Central America, was with calculating—and if
possible postponing—the end of the world. Could this be the purpose the
mysterious calendar was designed to fulfill? Could it have been a
mechanism for predicting some terrible cosmic or geological catastrophe?

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:214.
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28 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 168.

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