Kayab

Kayab is the seventeenth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Kayab, associated with the turtle and, in some readings, with song, 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. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, built of eighteen twenty-day months and a closing five-day period. With the following month, Kumku, it brings the eighteen full months toward their close before the short final period of the year.

Kayab, the seventeenth month, is generally translated with reference to the turtle, a reading epigraphers connect to Classic-period imagery in which a turtle carapace can represent the surface of the earth, most famously in depictions of the maize god emerging from a cracked turtle shell, an image widely read as the mythic sprouting of maize from the earth's surface after the agricultural rains. Whether Kayab's own glyph specifically encodes this turtle-earth symbolism, or the month name's connection to turtles rests on a separate and more limited linguistic association, is not settled with full certainty among specialists, and this atlas notes the plausible but not conclusively proven link rather than presenting it as an established fact.

Kayab is glossed as turtle, and the month glyph carries a turtle head in the Classic inscriptions. The turtle is a substantial figure in Maya cosmology, appearing as the cracked carapace of the earth from which the Maize God is reborn in Classic painted scenes, and as a constellation identified with the belt of Orion.

The seventeenth month is the last but one of the eighteen full months, and the year is by this point close to its seam. What follows Kumku is not another month but the five-day Wayeb, and because five is not twenty, the alignment between the Haab positions and the Tzolk'in day signs shifts by five places at the year turn, which is exactly why the four possible Year Bearers stand five apart in the twenty.

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.