Newly-discovered Maya 2012 inscriptions proclaim royal stability, researchers report, not apocalypse.

Announced today at the National Palace in Guatemala, the 1,300-year-old inscriptions from the ruins called La Corona, "provides only the second known reference to the so-called 'end date' for the Maya calendar on December 21, 2012," says a Tulane University statement. (In November, Mexican antiquities officials also had reported a newly-discovered "2012" inscription at the Comalcalco ruin, near the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, where the first 2012 inscription was found in 1960's.)

Left behind by looters at the site, the La Corona inscriptions depict a 696 A.D. visit to the ruin by the ruler of Calakmul, then one of the most powerful Classic Maya kingdoms. Calakmul's ruler, Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk', also known as Fire Claw or Jaguar Paw, had suffered a military defeat the year before and was apparently visiting allies at La Corona to reassure them of his survival.

"Scholars had assumed that the Calakmul king died or was captured in this engagement" says University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart, in the statement, "but this new extraordinary text from La Corona text tells us otherwise."

In the inscriptions, the defeated ruler invokes the Maya calendar to note that his rulership had started at the beginning of one 394-year endpoint, or Bak'tun, of the Maya calendar, and invokes the end of another Bak'tun in 2012, to proclaim his lineage's stability.

"This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy," says Tulane's Marcello Canuto, in the statement. "This new evidence suggests that the 13 Bak'tun date was an important calendrical event that would have been celebrated by the ancient Maya; however, they make no apocalyptic prophecies whatsoever regarding the date."