Call it cynical, or just a clever marketing ploy. But the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has based a glossy new exhibition on an idea that it spends much of the show debunking.

"Maya 2012: Lords of Time" owes its existence to the misconception that the Maya calendar predicted that the world would end in December 2012. Experts differ on whether the date in question is Dec. 21 or 23. Either way, no need to panic, the show's curators say: While a 400-year cycle of the Long Count calendar does conclude then, the ancient Maya believed that other cycles would follow.

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Stone Figure of the Maize God, from Copan, Honduras (A.D. 725).

The contemporary Maya, living in Mexico and Central America, don't even use that particular calendar anymore. "Maya 2012" suggests that many are unaware of the prophecy, while others view the whole end-of-the-world business mainly as a tourism bonanza.

Our own society's doomsday fixation is highlighted in a series of video images that open the exhibition, which bravely runs through Jan. 13, 2013. But where did this prediction of an imminent apocalypse originate?

Confusion about the Maya calendar is one source. Another, the exhibition suggests, may have been pessimistic Maya prophecies triggered by the Spanish conquest.

And a mix of Aztec and Maya beliefs recorded in a Colonial-era cosmological text known as the "Popol Vuh" likely played an important role. In that volume, "a series of different ideas from different sources have been fused together," including "possibly even some elements of Christianity," says Simon Martin, exhibition co-curator and associate curator of the Penn Museum's American section.

Leaving aside its flirtation with popular culture, "Maya 2012," presented in partnership with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, is a thoroughly professional piece of work. The faux-apocalyptic pretext offers the museum a chance to showcase more than 150 objects, about half excavated recently at Copan, Honduras, a Unesco World Heritage Site with well-preserved Maya ruins. The exhibition embeds these items in a generally coherent narrative that tracks the Maya culture's rise, transformation, partial destruction and overall endurance.

From a design perspective, the show is first rate, with legible texts, clear labeling and a clever layering of information, including a children's tour, a smartphone app and an audio tour. Its interactive stations allow visitors to combine Maya glyphs into names, watch animations of the Maya calendar, and conduct virtual explorations of archaeological sites. The show also employs illumination, diagrams, site photographs and drawings, casts and replicas, timelines and video—an impressive assortment of pedagogical aids.

Despite the best efforts of Mr. Martin and the exhibition's curator, Loa P. Traxler, however, much of the material resists easy explanation. And no wonder: Mr. Martin, an expert on the Mayan language, calls the writing system "the most complicated in human history." The Maya calendar, really a series of interlocking calendars, isn't much simpler—a testament to the culture's mathematical and astronomical sophistication.

By Julia M. Klein

A few themes do emerge clearly, including the idea suggested by the show's subtitle, "Lords of Time." The Maya kings of the Classic period, from A.D. 250 to 900, used the calendar to assert their dominance. "They portrayed themselves as embodiments of individual days and performed calendar rituals that expressed their close affinity to the gods," the exhibition says.

The Maya also possessed aesthetic flair. They particularly excelled at stone carving, on both a large and small scale. They created massive stone stelae, or pillars, extolling their civilization and cosmology, and intricate jade jewelry displaying images of the jaguar and the Sun God. They were also great colorists, painting their cities, their pots and their jewelry. Traces of cinnabar, a red pigment derived from a mercury compound and symbolizing rebirth, are still visible on jade pendants placed in the mouths of kings when they were buried.

One extraordinary example of Maya art, an intricate polychrome ceramic vessel known as "The Dazzler," is represented only by a replica because the original is too fragile to travel from the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History facilities in Copan. But there are other works here worth a second glance: a carved stone representation of the Maize God, with flowing "corn silk" hair; a reconstructed censer lid portraying the founder of the Copan dynasty; a carved pillar associated with the dynasty's "last true king"; a black ceramic bowl with a jaguar lid; and all those fierce and lovely jade pendants.

Among the myths the exhibition seeks to debunk is that the Maya civilization suffered a complete collapse after the Classic Period. While Copan and many major urban centers, along with the kings who ruled them, were felled by the related ills of drought, warfare, soil exhaustion and overpopulation, other cities—including Chichen Itza and Uxmal—grew in power and flourished until the 16th-century Spanish Conquest.

That event truly was apocalyptic, because of Spanish brutality toward the Maya and, even more so, epidemic disease, especially smallpox. Over the centuries, the Maya periodically suffered and rebelled against political, economic and cultural oppression. But neither they nor their traditions have vanished, the exhibition stresses. Video interviews with Maya archaeologists, a tour guide and others prove that point. Today's Maya no longer produce kings, but they retain much of their legacy of food, language, myths, crafts and pride.

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