Yax

Yax is the tenth 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, Yax, glossed as the green or first storm, yax meaning green, blue, and new, 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. Yax belongs to the colour-named run of months, Chen, Yax, Sak, and Keh, through the middle of the year. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two interlocking cycles that turn together in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round of Maya timekeeping.

Yax, the tenth month, uses the same word that opens Yaxkin's name, generally translated as green or new, and its glyph in Classic inscriptions is understood by most epigraphers to relate to that same sense of freshness or renewal rather than encoding an unrelated meaning, though, as with several Haab month names, the precise semantic range intended by Classic scribes is inferred from later Yucatan usage rather than fixed by an unambiguous Classic-period gloss. The month falls in the latter part of the annual cycle of eighteen twenty-day periods, before the calendar moves into the final months preceding Wayeb, the five unlucky closing days, and, like every Haab month, its calendrical date slid gradually against the true solar seasons over long spans because the 365-day count carries no leap-day correction.

Yax is the green storm, the second of the four colour-marked months that run from Chen through Keh. The word yax is one of the most productive in Classic Mayan, meaning green, blue, new and first at once, and it appears throughout the inscriptions in names, titles and place names as well as in this month and in Yaxkin.

Green sits at the centre of the Maya directional colour scheme rather than at any of the four quarters, which makes Yax the odd member of the storm month group and may be why it stands second rather than first. That is an observation about the names and not a claim about how the months were used, and no colonial or Classic source explains the ordering.

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.

The Haab month names present a general problem worth stating once. They are recorded in colonial Yucatec, they are attested by glyph in Classic Mayan, and the two languages are separated by centuries; a name whose meaning is transparent in one may be opaque in the other. Yax is among the clearer cases because the root survives in both, but several of the nineteen are glossed with more confidence in the literature than the evidence carries.