Pax

Pax is the sixteenth 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, Pax, glossed as planting time and associated in the sources with a great drum and with music, the month is known from the colonial record 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. 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 like meshed gears, coming back to the same paired position only once in fifty-two years, the Calendar Round.

Pax, the sixteenth month, is associated by several epigraphers with music, on the reasoning that a related root appears in Yucatec vocabulary connected to musical instruments and to dance, though, as with a number of Haab month names, the etymology is proposed rather than definitively settled by an unambiguous Classic-period gloss. If the reading is correct, Pax would place a documented association with music and performance at a specific point in the ritual year, a plausible fit with the broader pattern of Maya public ceremony, which regularly combined music, dance and procession, attested independently in mural and vase painting from the Classic period. Diego de Landa's account of the surrounding months does not single out a specific musical rite tied exclusively to Pax by name.

Pax is glossed as planting time and also connected with a drum, and Landa associates the month with a ceremony he names Pacum Chac, described in terms of war and of the war leaders. The two glosses do not sit together comfortably and the literature has read the month in both directions.

The planting reading raises the drift problem again. A month named for planting cannot have kept that seasonal fit across the centuries in a calendar without a leap day, so either the name records the season at the time the list was fixed, or it never referred to a season at all. Both positions are held, and the evidence does not decide between them.

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 war reading rests on Landa alone and the planting reading on the etymology alone, which is a fair summary of the state of the evidence for most of the nineteen names. Where the atlas can state a structural fact about a month it does; where the meaning is contested it says so rather than choosing the more colourful option, since a month name confidently glossed on thin evidence is exactly the sort of claim that propagates.