Ahau

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.

Ahau, also written Ajaw, is Ajpu in K'iche', and it closes the twenty. The Yucatec name means lord, and it is the ordinary Classic Maya word for a ruler, appearing in royal titles throughout the inscriptions; the K'iche' Ajpu means blowgunner and is the name of one of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The sign also carries the sun and the flower.

Central Mexico agrees with the flower reading, placing Xochitl in twentieth position. Between lord, sun, flower and blowgunner the sign accumulates more distinct glosses than any other in the list, which suits its position as the completion of the sequence.

Ahau has a structural prominence beyond the 260-day count. Every Long Count period ending falls on a day Ahau, because 360 and 7,200 and 144,000 are all divisible by twenty, so the great period endings that Classic monuments were raised to commemorate are always described by a number and Ahau. That is why the day appears so often on carved stelae. Ahau is not a Year Bearer in either Maya set, the Classic Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban or the Yucatec Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.

Because period endings fall on Ahau, the day is also the anchor of the Long Count's public face. A stela commemorating the close of a katun states the day as a number and Ahau together with the Haab position, and the great majority of dated Classic monuments that survive are of this kind. The twentieth sign is therefore the one a reader of the inscriptions meets most often.