Yaxkin

Yaxkin is the seventh of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Yaxkin, which means new sun or green sun, the month carried associations with the sun, with dryness, and with the ripening of the year. It is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, built of eighteen twenty-day months and a closing five-day period, which meshes with the 260-day sacred count in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round.

Yaxkin, the seventh month, combines yax, meaning green or new, with kin, sun or day, giving a name generally rendered as new sun or first sun, one of the more transparent etymologies among the nineteen Haab periods and consistent with its glyph, which in Classic inscriptions commonly incorporates a stylised sun sign. The name's seasonal association with a renewal of the sun does not correspond to any fixed solstice or equinox date, since the vague year's lack of a leap-day correction meant Yaxkin's calendrical position slid slowly through the true solar year over the centuries rather than remaining fixed to any single astronomical event, a point worth stressing because modern popular writing sometimes wrongly treats Haab month names as if they marked fixed seasonal or solar occasions the way the unrelated Chinese solar terms do.

The seventh month is where the Haab's relation to the sun is most often misread, because the name means new sun and invites the assumption that it marked a solstice. It did not, and could not have for long: without a leap-day correction the 365-day count slips against the tropical year by roughly a day every four years, so any seasonal fit the name records was true of a particular century and drifted away from it afterwards.

The Maya were entirely capable of tracking the true year. The Dresden Codex contains tables of Venus and of eclipses with corrections applied over long intervals, and Classic architecture at several sites is aligned to solar events. The Haab was simply not the instrument used for that work, any more than a week is used to date an equinox.

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.