Akbal is the third of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Akbal, it corresponds to the day Aq'ab'al in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the night, darkness, and the house of the interior, but also the coming dawn, for the K'iche' day Aq'ab'al signifies the twilight before sunrise as much as the dark. It is a sign of the inner world, dreams, and hidden things brought toward the light. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the west and the colour black. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that tradition understands them.
Akbal is the third of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Aq'ab'al. Its imagery is night, darkness and the interior of a structure or cave, and by extension dreams, the unconscious and the liminal hours before dawn, a reading consistent with the glyph's frequent interpretation by epigraphers as representing a darkened house or a shuttered window. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Akbal belongs to the west and the colour black, west being the direction of the setting sun and, across Mesoamerican cosmology generally, associated with the underworld and with night's approach.