Ak’bal (Aq’ab’al)
The third Maya day sign: night and darkness. Eric Thompson saw in it the jaguar god of the dark inside of the earth; K’iche’ daykeepers, who call it Aq’ab’al, make it the day of the light of dawn.
Meaning
Ak’bal is the third of the twenty day signs of the 260-day count; in K’iche’ it is Aq’ab’al. Eric Thompson found that the Ixil and K’iche’ connect the day with night, that the Zapotec day in the same place means night and the Aztec means house (see Aztec day signs), and concluded that the names mean night or darkness. The K’iche’ daykeepers of Komon Tohil, in Zunil, Guatemala, in an account of the days that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian reproduces on its Living Maya Time site, give the same root, “darkness”, and add that the day means dawn and hand: the light of dawn and the dark together. It is a day, they write, to ask for light to reach all things, and the day for the feelings of the heart.
Origin and history
The glyph, in Thompson’s description, is looped lines around hooks above an undulating line of three connected curves; Morley found it practically the same on the monuments and in the codices. What the lines show is disputed. Beyer read the wavy line as a section of a snake’s body, the feathered serpent, to which he gave a meaning of night. Thompson preferred the scales on the belly of the earth monster, whose back is the earth’s surface and whose underside would be its dark interior, and he called his own identification “highly speculative”. He made the god of the day the jaguar god of that dark interior. Kettunen and Helmke give the Classic Maya name, with a question mark, as Ak’ab.
Read next
- Next in Maya symbols and godsK’an (K’at)The fourth Maya day sign, read by scholars as the ripe grain of maize. K’iche’ daykeepers call the day K’at, the net, and ask on it for a child to be born.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsTumi (ceremonial knife)A ceremonial knife with a half-moon blade from the north coast of ancient Peru. The gold tumis of the Sicán (Lambayeque) culture carry a god on the handle, often identified as Naylamp, the dynasty’s mythical founder. The Tumi de Oro was declared a pre-Columbian symbol of Peru in 1981.
See also
Ix (I’x), Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna, Maize God, Maya calendar.
Sources
- Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction (J. Eric S. Thompson, 1950), J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 589 (Washington, 1950), chapter 3, “The cycle of 260 days”; Internet Archive full text, Internet Archive, pp. 73–75, “Akbal, Akabal, Uotan, Watan”
- An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs (Sylvanus G. Morley, 1915), Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 57 (Smithsonian Institution, 1915), chapter III and figs. 16–17; Project Gutenberg eBook 43491, Project Gutenberg, chapter III, Table I; p. 39
- The Meaning of the Days in the Maya Sacred Calendar (Komon Tohil, Living Maya Time), Group of K’iche’ Day Keepers Komon Tohil, Zunil, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, “The Meaning of the Days in the Maya Sacred Calendar”, reproduced with permission in Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (PDF), National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, p. 3, Aq’ab’al
- Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke, Mesoweb, 2020), Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs, 17th revised edition (Wayeb and Mesoweb, 2020), Appendices, Tables X–XI, “Day names in the Tzolk’in calendar”, Mesoweb, Table X
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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