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mesoamerica

maya

tzolkin

zodiac

culture

Tenth of the twenty. Yucatec Ok; K'iche' Tz'i'. The Classic sign is a canine head — a distinct ear, a blunt muzzle and jaw markings that separate it from the jaguar and the other animal heads in the inventory. The site's tooltip gives it as the loyal dog who guides at night. Direction north, colour white.

The dog as guide of the dead is not a Maya peculiarity but a Mesoamerican commonplace, and it is one of the better-evidenced beliefs in the region: dogs were buried with the dead across a very wide area and a very long span, and the Aztec cognate Itzcuintli, dog, has Mictlantecuhtli, lord of the dead, as its patron. The dead had a river to cross and the dog took them over it.

Religion and daykeeping

In living highland practice, Tz'i' is the day of law and of authority. Ethnographic accounts and Guatemalan Maya organisations describe it as the day for legal matters — disputes, judgements, land boundaries, the settling of a case — and for authority exercised justly or abused. Alongside that, and stated plainly in the sources, it governs sexuality and its excesses; the dog is loyal and the dog is also indiscriminate, and the day carries both. It is named as a day for asking pardon in a quarrel and for the recovery of what was taken. An ajq'ij born on Tz'i' is spoken of as a defender and an advocate, with a temper that has to be watched. Emphasis differs by community, and the working detail is taught inside the initiation lineage rather than published.

In the Classic and Postclassic record, dogs appear as companions, as sacrifice, and as guides — the archaeology of dog burials is extensive enough that the guide belief is inferred from bones as well as from books. Dogs are painted among the figures in the Dresden Codex almanacs, and the Madrid Codex, dominated by 260-day working almanacs for farming, hunting and beekeeping, includes hunting sequences where dogs do what dogs do. The colonial Books of Chilam Balam preserve day-by-day augury lists that assign trades and fortunes to each of the twenty — a colonial-era source in an imported format, and a different kind of evidence again from a Classic-period carved date or a contemporary daykeeper's practice.

Note that the Maya sources do not offer a clean one-to-one list of patron deities for the twenty days in the way the Aztec Borgia-group codices do. Where a day-and-god association is given here it comes either from the almanacs, where a station repeatedly falls under a particular deity, or from the modern nawal system, which is a living framework and not a reconstruction of the Classic one.

The Zapotec piyè and the Mixtec codices run the same twenty signs; the Mixtec position is conventionally glossed Dog.

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.
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

Ok returns every twenty days, and its coefficient rises by seven at each return because twenty leaves a remainder of seven on division by thirteen: 7, 1, 8, 2, 9, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 12, 6, 13. Thirteen appearances cover every number and take 260 days.

Upcoming in 2026, on the site's GMT anchor: 20 August (2 Ok), 9 September (9 Ok), 29 September (3 Ok).

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