Stela Fragment with Glyphs 4th–9th century Maya This is a fragment of the bas relief known as Tortuguero Monument 6, which contains one of the most infamous and contentious hieroglyphic texts in the Classic Maya (ca. 250–900) corpus. For many years epigraphers and lay enthusiasts honed in on the final passage of the text as a "prophecy," a tale of what would have happened on the date 4 Ahaw 3 K'ank'in in the Maya calendar. This corresponded to a day in December 2012, leading to spurious and sensational claims about an end of days predicted by the ancient Maya. The Met's fragmen

Stela Fragment with Glyphs 4th–9th century Maya This is a fragment of the bas relief known as Tortuguero Monument 6, which contains one of the most infamous and contentious hieroglyphic texts in the Classic Maya (ca. 250–900) corpus. For many years epigraphers and lay enthusiasts honed in on the final passage of the text as a "prophecy," a tale of what would have happened on the date 4 Ahaw 3 K'ank'in in the Maya calendar. This corresponded to a day in December 2012, leading to spurious and sensational claims about an end of days predicted by the ancient Maya. The Met's fragment contains a pivotal portion of the text. The main event of the Tortuguero Monument 6 text is the ritual dedication of a building, quite possibly a mortuary structure, on the date January 11, 669 ( 9 Etz'nab 6 K'ayab). A local lord of Tortuguero, calling himself "Lord Jaguar," burned fire for the first time in the structure on that date, activating it as a ritual space. Throughout the text, the sculptor makes reference to future and past calendric period endings, similar to saying something like "just before the New Year," or "after last Fourth of July." Scribes did this to anchor these mortal events in the giant cosmic cycles recorded in both the Long Count (a linear calendar counting up from a fixed point in 3114 ) and the Calendar Round (an interlocking set of coefficients, months, and days that cycled completely every fifty-two years).The local history of Tortuguero is intimately linked with that of the great Classic Maya kingdom of Palenque, in modern-day Chiapas, Mexico. In fact, rulers at Tortuguero, in the nearby state of modern-day Tabasco, used the same emblem glyph as Palenque, part of a sort of dynastic heraldic symbol or toponym. Scholars know little about the origins of the dynasty at Tortuguero: Was the lineage using the same emblem glyph because they were subordinate to the dynasts at Palenque, or were the rulers at Tortuguero members of

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