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Keh, the Red Storm

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Keh, the Red Storm

Keh is the twelfth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar of eighteen twenty-day months and a final five-day period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Keh, glossed as the red storm and also carrying the sense of deer, 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. Keh completes the colour-named run of months, Chen, Yax, Sak, and Keh. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, one of the two great cycles of Maya timekeeping; the 365-day Haab and the 260-day Tzolk'in turn together, returning to the same paired position once every fifty-two years, the Calendar Round.

Keh, the twelfth month, is generally translated as deer, and if the reading is correct it would place a second deer-associated name in the Haab alongside Sip, the third month linked to the hunting deity Zip, though the two names are not obviously connected in surviving sources and no text explains why deer imagery might recur at two separate points in the calendar. Diego de Landa's account associates a broad span of months around this point in the year with continued hunting and provisioning activity appropriate to the agricultural cycle in Yucatan, without singling out Keh for a uniquely documented rite of its own. As with the calendar's other periods, the month's alignment to the true solar seasons shifted gradually over the centuries because the 365-day vague year applies no leap-day correction.

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