2012, end of the world

Nostradamus’s house at Salon-de-Provence, as reconstructed after the 1909 earthquake.

In 1531 Nostredame was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to come to Agen.^[1] There he married a woman of uncertain name (possibly Henriette d’Encausse), who bore him two children.^[3] In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the Plague. After their deaths, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy.^[1]

On his return in 1545, he assisted the prominent physician Louis Serre in his fight against a major plague outbreak in Marseille, and then tackled further outbreaks of disease on his own in Salon-de-Provence and in the regional capital, Aix-en-Provence. Finally, in 1547, he settled in Salon-de-Provence in the house which exists today, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children – three daughters and three sons.^[1] Between 1556 and 1567 he and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge canal project organized by Adam de Craponne to irrigate largely waterless Salon-de-Provence and the nearby Désert de la Crau from the river Durance.^[2]

Notes

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Maya art, here taken to mean the visual arts, is the artistic style typical of the Maya civilization, that took shape in the course the Preclassic period (1500 B.C. to 250 A.D.), and grew greater during the Classic period (c. 200 to 900 AD), and went through a Postclassic phase until the upheavals of the sixteenth century destroyed courtly culture and put an end to a great artistic tradition. The Olmecs, Teotihuacan and the Toltecs have all influenced Maya art. Traditional art forms have mainly survived in weaving and the design of peasant houses.

Architecture

A Maya temple at Tikal

Maya architecture is first of all the lay-out of the impressive houses, courtyards, and temples where the kings resided, characterised by the immense horizontal floors of the plazas located at various levels, and the broad and often steep stairs connecting these. Dam-like causeways spread from these ‘ceremonial centers’ to other nuclei of habitation.

Bibliography

• Dale M. Brown ed. Lost Civilizations: The Magnificent Maya. Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life books, 1993.
• Carol Kaufmann. 2003. “Maya Masterwork”. National Geographic December 2003: 70-77.
• Constantino Reyes-Valerio, “De Bonampak al Templo Mayor, Historia del Azul Maya en Mesoamerica”, Siglo XXI Editores, 1993.

Links

• Web page of the Maya Blue Pigment
• Maya Art with Photos

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The present-day Maya, as a whole, do not attach much significance to b’ak’tun 13. Although the calendar round is still used by some Maya tribes in the Guatemalan highlands, the Long Count was employed exclusively by the classic Maya, and was only recently rediscovered by archaeologists.^[1] Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun and Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal both note that “apocalypse” is a Western concept that has little or nothing to do with Mayan beliefs. Bernal believes that such ideas have been foisted on the Maya by Westerners because their own myths are “exhausted”.^[2][3] Archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni says that while the idea of “balancing the cosmos” was prominent in ancient Maya literature, and some modern Maya affirm this idea of an age of coexistence, the 2012 phenomenon does not present this message in its original form. Instead, it is bound up with American traditions such as the New Age movement, millenarianism, and the belief in secret knowledge from distant times and places.^[4] Mayan archaeologist Jose Huchm has stated that “If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea. That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain”.^[2]

What significance the classic Maya gave the 13th b’ak’tun is uncertain. Most classic Maya inscriptions are strictly historical and do not make any prophetic declarations.^[5] Two items in the Maya historical corpus, however, may mention the end of the 13th b’ak’tun: Tortuguero Monument 6 and, possibly, the Chilam Balam.

Citations

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.