As a first step to deriving effective dynamics and ray optics, we prove that the perturbed periodic Maxwell operator in d = 3 can be seen as a pseudo­differential operator. This necessitates a better understanding of the periodic Maxwell operator \mathbf M_0 . In particular, we characterize the behavior of \mathbf M_0 and the physical initial states at small crystal momenta k and small frequencies. Among other things, we prove that generically the band spectrum is symmetric with respect to inversions at k = 0 and that there are exactly 4 ground state bands with approximately linear dispersion near k = 0 .