Did you know that there have been three-day, four-day, five-day, six-day, eight-day, nine-day, ten-day, 12-day, 13-day, 19-day, and 20-day weeks as well as our own seven-day week? Have you ever stopped to consider where the idea of the week came from?
Eviatar Zerubavel did, and in 1985 he published the first edition of The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. This was one of the books Maya left behind on her bookshelf when she left this world, and it’s an eye-opening one!
Eviatar says “the seven-day cycle was originally associated not only with the seven days of the Creation, but also with the seven so-called ‘Planets’.” Figure 1 in his book is a detailed list of all the names of the planetary days in many of the languages of the world.
But we know this already. We know it from three of the more obvious names in our English language: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, for Saturn, the sun, and the moon. Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus were the namesakes of our four other days of the week.
Saturn, the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus were called the “wandering planets” by ancient Babylonians, also known as Chaldeans, as they developed astronomy. “That each of those seven planets (generally conceived as deities) affects human fortune in its own distinctive way is originally a Babylonian idea,” says Eviatar. At one time the word, Chaldean, was synonymous with the word, astrologer.
The Jewish week was also seven days, but one of these days was more important than the other. The Jewish week was built around the idea of the Sabbath, the day god rested. And some argue that the Sabbath was originally the seventh day of the year and observed only once a year in commemoration of the Creation.
As a result, it was the Egyptians who first instituted a continuous seven-day week throughout the year. And in doing so they were the also first people to create a continuous weekly cycle that was entirely independent of the lunar cycle. This was possibly a result of being sun-worshipers.
Says Eviatar, “It is interesting to note that the rise of the Sabbath cult within Judaism coincided with the withdrawal from worshiping the celestial bodies, and particularly the moon. In other words, the dissociation of the week from a natural cycle such as the waxing and waning of the moon can be seen as part of a general movement toward introducing a supernatural deity. Not being personified in any particular natural force, the Jewish god was to be regarded as untouched by nature in any way….” (p 11)
He continues, “Only by being based on an entirely artificial mathematical rhythm could the Sabbath observance become totally independent of the lunar or any other natural cycle. A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history paying no attention whatsoever to the moon and its phases is a distinctively Jewish invention. Moreover, the disassociation of the seven-day week from nature has been one of the most significant contributions of Judaism to civilization.”
Christianity, along with the Roman conquests, continued the march away from astrological time based on the natural cycles of the heavenly bodies. Thus, while the day is based on the earth, and the month on the moon, and the year on the sun, the week has no natural thing to mark its passing. The week as we know it is a “human-made” construction, which as I mentioned at the start of this discussion, has been almost as variable as the number of days in a month.
So where did the other types of weeks around the world come from? They came mainly from the need for a market-day cycle, a day or days set aside from others for selling things to everyone within walking or riding distance.
Later on, with the rise of the industrial revolution, they came from the need for a common workweek. In several parts of the book Eviatar traces the idea of the workweek, including the early 20th-century Russian experiment with a five-day workweek (Nepreryvka).
Eviatar’s book prompted me to wonder why the continuous-cycle week was so important to modern civilization. I think it’s because the week allows people to track time in a very repetitious (and boring!) way.
That’s why some of our holidays are so difficult to plan for. They fall on a yearly (solar) calendar day rather than on the same day of the week every year. Jesus Christ’s birthday and our own birthdays are examples of this.
There’s a kind of “emotive dissonance,” involved in trying to figure out when a birthday falls within a month. This is true of any other event that doesn’t repeat on a specific day of the week each year or each month.
Because of that discombobulation, the effect of religious and personal holidays based on the specific day of the month or of the month and year is to take us outside of ordinary normal “weekly” time and into a more ancient way of reckoning time.
The circular continuity of modern days of the week dulls us to the preciousness of each day of our lives. There will always be another Monday, we think, or another Friday, we hope!
Circular conception of short periods of time encourages routines rather than celebrations of solstices, equinoxes and other significant days of the year. The Judeo-Christian religious leaders find this helpful. So do employers. In short, the week is a way one part of humanity controls another part to accomplish its ends.
As a creative person I found I needed to step outside of the traditional seven-day week to “be myself.” I became self-employed not because I could not work for others or with others, but because I could not work within the confines of the traditional workweek. To meet my life’s purpose, I needed to travel back to the “Promised Land” where I could write at will, while working during a time of my own choosing in service of my clients.
In my opinion, the abandonment of the week, for however brief a time, is also necessary to reach a truly “spiritual” or “playful” state in life. In one of Eviatar’s discussions about different calendars in the world, he says, “As a matter of fact, the 260-day divinatory calendar (along with the traditional solar calendar) has been preserved to this day in many parts of rural Mexico and Guatemala, and particularly among the Highland Maya, “daykeepers” are still being consulted regularly about the most propitious days for getting married, going on trips, building houses, and launching business enterprises.”
I say long live the daykeepers! And may Maya’s Daykeeper Journal make all your days be propitious ones this coming year!
Wait ..wha….what??!!! This is how I am 5 minutes after reading this essay. Talk of dropping multiple earth-shattering truth bombs from the continuous weeks to the sun and day keepers vs lunar cycles and the tacit mind-control involved. I need to read about the Maya and of course Eviatar.
And to think I came here searching for info on Nepreryvka. Knowing civilization didnt start with babylonians am also now inclined to research what the chinese based time on as they have a longer recorded history of this stuff. Great work Nancy!
Hi Mambo,
If you’re interested in time, I reccommend Jay Griffith’s book “A Sideways Look at Time” (that’s the title as it was published in the U.S., in Britain I think it was called “Pip Pip” and was fairly well-read, in the U.S. it has remained fairly obscure).
It’s not her best book (would put “A Country Called Childhood”/”Kith” as her finest work to date), but it’s an interesting survey of attitudes toward time and time-keeping around the world. She posits that we are the first civilization in the history of the world to conceive of time as linear.
I love how she writes about women as timekeepers and connects giving birth to a child as literally creating time.
Thanks Mambo, if you find more info I hope you’ll share it on Daykeeper! Nancy
Eviatar said the the Egyptian week was the earliest continuous use of weeks within the year. Their week was indeed 10 days, not 7, as I typed. The Egyptian calendar had 12 months, but unlike ours, it was not based on the sun’s cycles. Each of the 12 months in their year had 30 days, leaving 5 extra days per year.
There were 3 weeks in a month; each week was 10 days. The 36 weeks of the Egyptian calendar year were based not on the moon’s cycles, but rather on a main star in each of their 36 celestial constellations.
Eviatar was tracing how the week became detached from the lunar cycle, as well as continuous. He concludes that: “A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history paying no attention whatsoever to the moon and its phases is a distinctively Jewish invention.” (p11). This invention resulted in the week becoming a human social construction detached from all natural celestial phenomena.
The Ancient Egyptians had a 10-day week, 3 weeks per month with 5 extra days at the end of the year. They had 3 seasons of 4 months each that were defined by the agricultural effects of the Nile River [Inundation/Growth/Harvest]. While they worshipped the Sun, and they were fully aware of solstices and equinoxes, they didn’t base their timekeeping on solar cycles either.
Their 10 day week was based on the rising of certain star groups over the horizon, the source of the astrological decans. While it is true that their weeks were independent of lunar cycles, it is not true they created the 7 day week.
Nancy,
Thank you so much for sharing this information on how the 7 day week came to be. We are so used to this format that it would never have occurred to me that we were being manipulated! Just another yin-yang, male-female, out-of-balance duality to overcome I suppose. I really must order at least one of these books, and maybe another for a friend. Thank you again for your report.