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Third of the twenty. Yucatec Ak'b'al; K'iche' Aq'ab'al. The Classic main sign is a cartouche enclosing a dark bracketed recess, usually described in the epigraphic literature as a shadowed niche or the interior of a house seen from outside — an opening with nothing visible in it. Head variants carry night and jaguar attributes. The word is night, darkness, and in the highland form also dawn: the hinge, not the whole of the dark. The site's tooltip gives it as night and the dream house. Direction west, colour black.
The Aztec cognate is Calli, house, whose patron is Tepeyollotl. That is a real divergence, not a translation slip: the Maya name says night and the Nahua name says house. The glyph — an enclosure, a dark interior — sits comfortably under both readings, and which meaning came first is not recoverable.
Religion and daykeeping
In contemporary highland practice, Aq'ab'al is the turn from dark to light, and it is a favourable day. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day of dawn and of clarity: for beginnings, for bringing a concealed matter into the open, for asking that light be thrown on a question, and, in many communities, for marriage petitions. It is also the day of dreams, on the understanding that what the night shows is not noise. An ajq'ij born on Aq'ab'al is spoken of as bringing things to light — a clarifier — with the corresponding risk of exposing what was better left folded. As always, emphasis varies by community and by individual daykeeper, and the working detail is taught inside the apprenticeship rather than written down.
Ak'b'al also belongs to one of the three attested year-bearer sets — Ak'b'al, Lamat, B'en, Etz'nab' — the four names on which a Haab' year could open, necessarily five apart. Landa's sixteenth-century Yucatec set was K'an, Muluk, Ix, Kawak, and the Guatemalan highlands today use Ik', Manik', Eb', Kab'an as the Mam. Which set a community used is a matter of place and period, not of correctness.
In the Classic record, night is not an empty interval. It is the underworld's daytime, the hours the sun spends below as the Jaguar God of the Underworld, and it is when the wahy beings painted on Classic funerary pottery move. The Dresden Codex almanacs are read as sequences of stations across the 260 days, with gods and auguries attached to each; the Madrid Codex, the largest surviving book and almost entirely working almanacs, uses the same structure for farming, hunting and beekeeping. The colonial Books of Chilam Balam carry lists of the twenty days with brief auguries and associated trades. Those are three distinct source layers — Classic epigraphy, colonial ethnohistory, present-day practice — and a claim that holds in one does not automatically hold in the others.
The Zapotec piyè and the Mixtec count run the same twenty signs; Mixtec codices are conventionally glossed House at this position.
Key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 600–500 BCE (contested) | Earliest 260-day count glyphs, Oaxaca — San José Mogote and Monte Albán. Zapotec, not Maya. |
| 36 / 32 BCE | Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2 and Tres Zapotes Stela C, the earliest dated Long Counts. Both partly reconstructed. |
| c. 250–900 CE | Classic period: day signs in cartouches with bar-and-dot coefficients across the lowlands. |
| 11th–12th c. CE (debated) | The surviving Dresden Codex copy, with its 260-day almanacs and new-year pages. |
| 1562 / 1566 | Landa burns the books at Maní, then records the twenty day names in his Relación. |
| 1905–1935 | The Goodman–Martínez–Thompson correlation, constant 584283. Mainstream, not unanimous. |
| 11 Aug 3114 BCE | Long Count zero under GMT 584283 (6 Sep 3114 BCE Julian); the 584285 variant gives 13 August. |
| 21 Dec 2012 | 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in — the anchor this site counts from. |
| 1995 / 1996 | Guatemala's Peace Accords recognise Maya spirituality and access to sacred places. |
In the count
Ak'b'al returns every twenty days, and because twenty leaves a remainder of seven on division by thirteen, its coefficient climbs by seven each time: 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13, then round again. Thirteen appearances, 260 days, and a given pairing comes back.
Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 13 August (8 Ak'b'al), 2 September (2 Ak'b'al), 22 September (9 Ak'b'al).
Related
- Maya Tzolk'in — the system, the count, and what it is not.
- Ik' — the day before.
- K'an — the day after.
- World Zodiacs · Religion · Calendar