Kib’ (Ajmaq)
The sixteenth Maya day sign, read as a section of a shell. Its names are wax, sinner and the souls of the ancestors; K’iche’ daykeepers call it Ajmaq, a day to give thanks and avoid mistakes.
Meaning
Kib’ is the sixteenth of the twenty day signs of the 260-day count, written Cib by Morley and Thompson; in K’iche’ it is Ajmaq. The Aztec day in the same place is Cozcaquauhtli, king vulture (see Aztec day signs). 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, derive Ajmaq from the word “will”, and write that it is a very special day on which people and the daykeepers work to prevent mistakes, and a day to give thanks for the physical and material well-being of people and communities.
Origin and history
Morley found the carved and painted forms of the sign very unlike. Eric Thompson thought the carved form “almost surely a section of a univalve shell”, and he made the day, as “a fair assumption” rather than a proof, the day of the Bacabs, the gods who hold up the sky at the four sides of the world and were patrons of beekeeping. Kettunen and Helmke leave the Classic Maya name blank.
Wax, sinners and the ancestors
The day’s names have drifted, by Thompson’s account. Yucatec cib means wax, and the Chilam Balam of Chumayel says the first candle was made on 6 Cib, though candles reached the Maya only with the Spanish. Ajmaq is often given as “sinner”, but Thompson held that it “formerly meant the souls of the dead”. Schultze Jena found that on Ajmaq the K’iche’ made offerings to the souls of their ancestors and asked them to visit their homes, and Tax recorded it at Chichicastenango as the day of the ancestral spirits. The bee has its own page.
Read next
- Next in Maya symbols and godsKab’an (No’j)The seventeenth Maya day sign, a curl like a question mark: the earth, and the lock of hair of the young moon goddess. K’iche’ daykeepers call the day No’j, wisdom and thought.
- Thompson tied Kib’ to the Bacabs, patrons of beekeepingBee symbolismIn ancient Egypt bees were said to come from the tears of the sun god Re. English folk custom tells the bees when someone in the family dies; Napoleon chose the bee as an imperial emblem, and Manchester and Utah use the bee and the beehive for industry.
See also
Kukulkan, Chaac, Itzamna, Maize God, Maya calendar, Maya numerals (bar and dot).
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. 84–86 and 88–90, “Cib, Chabin, Ah Mac, Ah Mak”
- 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. 40
- 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. 2, Ajmaq
- 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 XI
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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