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Haab Months

Chen

Haab Months

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Origin 250 to 900 CE

The ninth of the eighteen twenty-day months of the Haab, Chen in Landa's spelling, and the first of a run of four months named by colour. The colour element here is black, and the second element is conventionally rendered storm, though that part is a reconstruction and other readings have been proposed. It ran from 0 Chen to 19 Chen. The four together, black, green, white and red, correspond to the Maya directional colours, which is the strongest reason for treating the series as a deliberate set rather than a coincidence.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
250 to 900 CE 1Tradition: Classic Maya inscriptions
Origin Period
Haab month names are attested in Classic period Maya inscriptions and in the Postclassic codices, part of a 365 day civil calendar securely in use across the Maya lowlands from at least the Late Preclassic period into the Spanish colonial era. 1
Place of Origin
The Maya lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and Chiapas. 1
Origin of the Name
The name recorded here, Chen, is the colonial Yucatec form set down after the conquest, and the gloss beside it is a colonial gloss. The Classic glyph for the same period is read differently. 2Tradition: Colonial Yucatec Maya sources (the Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan and the Books of Chilam Balam)
Language
Maya hieroglyphic 1
Language
Yucatec Maya 2
Attributions
Day Count
20 Days 1
Open Questions
Literal Meaning
Black storm 1
The literal meaning recorded here is the colonial gloss, not a settled reading. In the Classic inscriptions the month is written Iksihoom, the colour term for black joined to a second element, sihoom, whose meaning is not established and which the epigraphic literature leaves untranslated. The storm sense came in with the post-conquest Yucatec name, and the inscriptions do not supply it, so what the month was literally called is at present unknown.
Identity
Position
9 of 19 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The Classic reading is Iksihoom, the colour black joined to an element whose meaning is not established. The storm sense belongs to the post-conquest Yucatec name and does not come from the inscriptions. 1Tradition: Classic Maya inscriptions
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
A standard analytic category in the study of religion 1
Learn More
Chen, the Black Storm

Chen is the ninth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Chen, glossed as the black storm and carrying the sense of a well or cave, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. The month names Chen, Yax, Sak, and Keh form a set glossed by colours joined to storm or the year, marking a run through the middle of the Haab. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, meshed with the sacred count in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round.

Chen, the ninth month, takes its name from the Yucatec word for a well or cenote, the same water-source term embedded in place names across the peninsula, including Chichen Itza, literally at the mouth of the well of the Itza. The etymological link to Chen's neighbour Mol, generally read as to gather, has led some scholars to treat the eighth and ninth months as forming a loosely related pair concerned with water in the Yucatec ritual year, though this reading is an inference from the two names' meanings rather than a connection stated outright in any surviving Classic or colonial text. As with the calendar's other periods, Chen's position relative to the true solar seasons drifted over the centuries because the 365-day vague year applies no leap-day correction.

Chen in the Calendar Round

Chen is the first of the four storm months, whose names carry the colour terms black, green, white and red in order: Chen the black, Yax the green, Sak the white and Keh the red. The four run consecutively as months nine through twelve, a block of eighty days in the middle of the year marked out by a single naming scheme.

The colours are the Maya directional colours, red for east, white for north, black for west, yellow for south, with green at the centre, and the four storm months use four of the five. Why the sequence runs black, green, white, red rather than in the directional order is not explained by any source, and the atlas does not supply a reason where the evidence does not.

A Maya date does not name a month and a number in the way a European one does. It names a day in the 260-day Tzolk'in, by number and sign, and a position in the 365-day Haab, by day and month, and the two together form the Calendar Round, which repeats only after 18,980 days, a little under fifty-two years. Within the Haab the days of a month are numbered from zero to nineteen, and the zero day is not called first but seated, the seating of the month, a usage the Classic inscriptions write with its own glyph.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

Haab, Calendars

One of the eighteen twenty day months of the Haab.

Originates in Language

Classic Maya, Languages

The month names are attested by glyph in Classic Maya inscriptions, and the forms given here are the colonial Yucatec spellings under which they are usually cited. Two layers are involved and should not be collapsed: the glyphs are Classic Maya, the names come from sixteenth-century Yucatec sources, and the modern spellings follow current Mayan orthography rather than the colonial one.

Source Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An IntroductionJ. Eric S. Thompson
Sources
1. The Maya (9th edition)
Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston, Thames and Hudson, 2015ch. on Maya arithmetic, writing and the calendarView the Source
2. Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction
J. Eric S. Thompson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1962The Haab and the month glyphs
Quote, The Haab and the month glyphs
Phonemic analysis of the month glyphs in pre-Columbian inscriptions shows the names varied considerably from region to region and from period to period, so the colonial Yucatec forms are one attested set rather than the Maya usage.
View the Source
Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan
Diego de Landa, Dante S.A., 1864The count of the year and the months
Quote, The count of the year and the months
The Haab month names are known in colonial Yucatec spelling as transcribed in the sixteenth century, and this is the principal source for them and for the ritual associated with each month, including the treatment of Wayeb.
View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
What does the element sihoom mean in Iksihoom, the Classic name for this month?

In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What would resolve this A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.
Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston, The Maya (9th edition)
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