Ahau is the twentieth and last of the day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, kept by living daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period from the inscriptions. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Ahau, it corresponds to the day Ajpu, the blowgunner or hunter, in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the lord, the sun, and the flower, the solar lord in his fullness, enlightenment, and the completion of the round; Ajpu recalls the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, who defeat the lords of the underworld and rise as sun and moon. It is a day of mastery and of the ancestors made luminous. In the directional scheme it belongs to the south and the colour yellow. With Ahau the twenty signs close and begin again at Imix. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries.
Ahau is the twentieth and last of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Ajpu, meaning lord, master or, in the specific reading connected to the Popol Vuh's Hero Twin Hunahpu, blowgunner. Ahau's own imagery, the lord and the sun, marks it as the most prestigious of the twenty signs, and Ahau-named days recur throughout Classic-period inscriptions as the preferred day for major period-ending ceremonies, since Katun and Baktun endings in the Long Count fall, by the arithmetic of the calendar, only on days bearing the Ahau sign. In the directional scheme, Ahau belongs to the south and the colour yellow, closing the fifth directional set and the twenty-sign cycle before it returns to Imix.