how and when did the whole world end up using a seven day week when there are multiple calendars? It’s not an obvious number…?
In: 7383
Not a great answer for you, but around the world, in all ancient cultures, it made sense to have a calendar as a celestial system, meaning it’s based on planets, stars, the sun and the seasons.
They all figured out that a “year” is a thing, that the seasons and weather repeats, that today of this year is going to be similar, weather wise, to today of next year. So they created the concept of a “year” based on getting the weather right in this sense, for example you should always plant your crops on a certain day every year, or harvest them, etc.
Our calendar gets it’s roots from a specific culture – the ancient Babylonians. While every culture around the world had a similar “year”, they all divided it up a bit differently, concepts of “months” “weeks” etc. varied from place to place.
The Babylonians loved the number 7, especially with mystical things. Why? Because of space. The Moon, Mars, Venus, Sun, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn are all visible to the naked eye so it made sense in their minds to have 7 days named for each one. *Saturn*day, *Sun*day, *Moon*day, etc.
Now the Babylonian culture was thousands of years ago but this system passed around Europe and North Africa widely. In English our current “words” for the days derive from a mix of Latin and German roots but there are connections.
Jupiter (the planet) is tied to Jupiter (the God). Loosely, the Norse God “Thor” is culturally and thematically linked to Jupiter. *Jupiters*day became *Thors*day became Thursday.
Etc. etc.
Just case you are solely an English speaker, yes, these trends extend to the other Latin languages as well. In Spanish Luna means The Moon. So Moonday = Monday = Lunes.
it takes about 28 days for the moon to go from “full moon” to the next “full moon”.
this is something that people allover the world could easily observe (no light polution back then). now you can separate this “moon time” into four periods:
“kinda full” / “decreasing” / “kinda not there” / “increasing”.
each of those 4 phases is now 7 days.
What I want to know is why don’t we just have 13 months instead of 12, that way each month would be 28 days with only one outlier being 29. Enough of this sometimes 31 or sometimes 30 bullshit.
My reading on the subject is that a few cultures did weeks of different lengths but that a ton of cultures did 7 day weeks because there are 7 heavenly bodies that move in a pattern different from stars – the 5 visible planets plus moon and sun.
‘the world’ went to 7 day weeks due to western influence, but most were already doing that
The Hebrew and Muslim calendars both use a seven-day week because they’re related. The Roman calendar picked up a seven-day week after they converted to Christianity, because Christians go to church on the day after the Jewish Sabbath.
Our modern calendar is mostly Roman. Almost everyone uses this calendar now, or at least has to do business with people who use it. So now there’s a standard worldwide week.
It wasn’t always this way. The Chinese calendar, for example, sometimes used a seven day week, but mostly used shorter or longer weeks. Pagan Rome used an eight day week. The Maya calendar had no week.
It’s an astrological/astronomical thing, and as others have said, its creation was likely motivated by agricultural needs. The days of the week are each assigned to a heavenly body — one of the seven ones visible with the naked eye. The order of the assignment follows a system of so-called “planetary hours”, in which each hour of each day of the week is assigned to a planet, following a sequence called the “Chaldean order” (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, in that order, which is by apparent distance from the Earth, farthest to closest). Since there are 24 hours per day, 7 elements of the Chaldean order, and the remainder of 24 divided by 7 is 3, this results in the days of the week being sequentially named after every third element of the Chaldean order (i.e. Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, in that order).
This latter order becomes hilariously obvious to speakers of Romance languages (e.g. French, Italian) and Indic languages (e.g. Hindi, Bengali) once they’re aware of this fact, as the names of the days literally mean “day of X”, where X is one those heavenly bodies, or something that represents it (e.g. for Monday: “Lundi” = “day of Luna/moon” in French, “Somvar” = “day of Som (deity of the moon)” in Hindi). The Germanic languages (e.g. English) loosely follow this, with their days named after Norse deities (e.g. “Tuesday” = “day of Tíw”, who happens to be considered the Norse equivalent of the Roman god Mars, which corresponds to e.g. the French word for Tuesday, “Mardi”).
Astrological and astronomical ideas were very widely shared even in antiquity, which is why this 7-day system with naming of hours and days following the Chaldean order is prevalent and consistent throughout Eurasia. Cultures far outside that region used different systems. For example, in Mayan timekeeping, there is no notion of a week. The closest thing is the 13-day cycle of the Tzolk’in calendar, but that isn’t even consistent, with a 5-day “leap” period occurring after every twenty 13-day cycles to generate a 265-day calendar. Aside from the unnamed 5-day leap period, days in this calendar are assigned both a number between 1 and 13, and a name from a sequence of twenty names — funnily enough, this system is sort of an inverse of the Gregorian calendar, giving a unique name to each day of their 20-day “months”, and numbering the days of their 13-day “week”; in contrast to us _numbering_ the days of our months, and _naming_ the days of our week.
Because it nicely divides the year into 52 tidy periods… wait no, because we have 7 fing…dammit it’s the moon again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#History has a good summary:
>The earliest evidence of an astrological significance of a seven-day period is connected to Gudea, the priest-king of Lagash in Sumer during the Gutian dynasty (about 2100 BCE), who built a seven-room temple, which he dedicated with a seven-day festival. In the flood story of the Assyro-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the storm lasts for seven days, the dove is sent out after seven days, and the Noah-like character of Utnapishtim leaves the ark seven days after it reaches the firm ground.
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>Counting from the new moon, the Babylonians celebrated the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th as “holy days”, also called “evil days” (meaning “unsuitable” for prohibited activities). On these days, officials were prohibited from various activities and common men were forbidden to “make a wish”, and at least the 28th was known as a “rest day”. On each of them, offerings were made to a different god and goddess.
>A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest.
The Revolutionary regime in France attempted to get time and calendar to follow the more rational base 10 metric model. It did not catch on well, but it is an interesting quirk to learn a bit about.
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