Kankin is the fourteenth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Kankin, glossed as the yellow sun, kan meaning yellow and kin the sun or day, the month is known from the colonial sources and the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, a Maya date naming the day by its place within the month together with its Tzolk'in day. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two interlocking cycles of Maya timekeeping; a complete Calendar Round date names both the Tzolk'in day and the Haab position, a combination unique within a span of fifty-two years.
Kankin, the fourteenth month, combines kan, yellow, with kin, sun or day, generally rendered as yellow sun, echoing Yaxkin's new sun seven months earlier in the cycle, though the two names' shared use of kin does not imply any deliberate structural pairing intended by Classic-period calendar keepers, and no surviving text explains the recurrence beyond the plain descriptive sense of each name. As with Sak's possible colour-direction resonance, whether Kankin's yellow carries the cosmological associations yellow holds elsewhere in Maya thought, conventionally linked to the south, or is simply descriptive, is not settled among epigraphers. The month's Classic-period glyph does not by itself resolve the question, and this atlas records the ambiguity rather than asserting either reading as established fact.