Saturday, May 5, 2007

weeks

Who invented the week?

A week is different from a day or a year or a month because it's artificial. For cave-people a day is pretty easy to notice: it gets dark, it gets light, then when it starts to get dark again you know that a day has passed - plants and insects get this, and people must have caught on quickly too. A year is sort of long term, but again people would notice that the weather gets colder and warmer, plants and animals come and go, etc. A month... well, the moon comes and goes with the months (more or less - and in the Islamic calendar the moon is King in determining the months), which affects the tides, which affects fishing etc; also menstruation? ...

But a week is really an invention. I think in some parts of the world they have five-day week - that is, there's a market day every five days, I think that's the main thing that distinguishes a week. Who decided there would be seven days in a week?

... Well, now I know the answers to a lot of the above, having looked "week" up in wikipedia. For example, I know now that some societies have a week of three days, or eight; and that the "French Revolutionary Calendar had 36 weeks of 10 days and five or six extra days". It seems that weeks are mostly for purposes of commerce: market day, work days and rest days, etc. So weeks are unique to humans: birds, bees and educated fleas do without weeks, as do the Sun, moon and planets.

1 comment:

Felix said...

As an off the top of my head response, with no research or checking ... I assumed that the seven day week came from Genesis 1:2 ... "And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." (KJV rendition)