Kankin

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.

Kankin combines kan, yellow, with kin, sun or day, giving the yellow sun, and it stands with Yaxkin, the new or green sun, as one of two Haab months built on the word for sun. Yellow is the colour of the south in the Maya directional scheme.

The pairing of two sun months in a single year list is one of several signs that the nineteen names are not a simple sequence of unrelated words but a set with internal structure, alongside the two conjunction months, Wo and Sip, and the four storm months, Chen, Yax, Sak and Keh. What that structure was for is not recorded anywhere, and reconstructions of it are proposals rather than findings.

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.

Kankin also has a well-attested Classic glyph, and the match between a colonial Yucatec month name and a Classic glyph is not always as clean as it is here. Several of the nineteen are known by a glyph whose reading is secure and a name whose etymology is not, or the reverse, and the standard reference lists carry both the sign and the name because neither on its own is sufficient.