Keh

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.

Keh is the red storm and the last of the four colour-marked months, and the word is also the Mayan for deer, the same root that gives the K'iche' day name Kej. Whether the month name is the colour term or the animal is not settled between the sources, and both readings circulate in the literature.

Red is the colour of the east in the Maya scheme, the place of sunrise, and the deer is among the most frequently depicted animals in Maya art. The two readings are not in competition for the same evidence so much as drawn from different parts of it, and the atlas records the ambiguity rather than choosing.

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.

The colour readings across the nineteen months are strongest where they come in sets. Wo and Sip pair as the black and the red conjunction, and Chen, Yax, Sak and Keh run black, green, white and red together, so an isolated colour gloss such as this one is supported by its neighbours rather than standing alone. That is the ordinary way ambiguous month names are argued in the literature, from the pattern rather than from the single word.