Pax is the sixteenth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months and a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Pax, glossed as planting time and associated in the sources with a great drum and with music, the month is known from the colonial record 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 great cycles of Maya timekeeping; the 365-day Haab and the 260-day Tzolk'in turn together like meshed gears, coming back to the same paired position only once in fifty-two years, the Calendar Round.
Pax, the sixteenth month, is associated by several epigraphers with music, on the reasoning that a related root appears in Yucatec vocabulary connected to musical instruments and to dance, though, as with a number of Haab month names, the etymology is proposed rather than definitively settled by an unambiguous Classic-period gloss. If the reading is correct, Pax would place a documented association with music and performance at a specific point in the ritual year, a plausible fit with the broader pattern of Maya public ceremony, which regularly combined music, dance and procession, attested independently in mural and vase painting from the Classic period. Diego de Landa's account of the surrounding months does not single out a specific musical rite tied exclusively to Pax by name.