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How far back in history do you have to go before the days of the week (monday, tuesday, etc) no longer line up... in other words, how long have we been consistently keeping track of days of the week as a society before it breaks down...
@freemo Oh gods, a 7-day week goes back even further than that. It corresponds with the phases of the moon. Full, waning half, new, waxing half. Though it'd not be perfect as it's not exactly 28 days, so some days got added sometimes in the final week. So the concept dates back to like 21st century BC apparently.
Look what you made me do.. I had to look it up and learn something!
@trinsec im not just talking about a 7 day week in general... but rather how far back sunday is sunday... like if you go back 2000 years was sunday really on a tuesday or some shit.
Of course im assuming the name changes with language a bit, so im talking about whatever name they called it that translates to tuesday.
@freemo In that case my bet is on the Romans.
@trinsec I find it shocking that things like days of the week, calendars, and how we tell time is pretty much universal around the world in every modern society... I would half expect every country to have their own number of hours in a day and days in a week :) I know the chinese keep two calendars.
@freemo Oh yes, some have a Julian calendar instead. And what about Islamic calendars? It's the whole reason the Ramadan is on a different time of year every year. A fair amount of places do use a different calendar system.
It's just that for the world's sanity's sake we apparently have agreed on one single calendar to interact with each other...
And of course the West colonized a lot of countries, forcing our known calendar on them.. that might've aided a bit too. :P
@freemo most probably the recorded history will stop with the Babylonian
@sgul it would be curious if it goes back to pre-recorded history
@freemo I am sure it does go back... but no record of it so far. Nature is a poor record keeper
@sgul @freemo Wikipedia says 7-day "weeks" go back to Babylonia, including one day a week for making offering to the gods and avoiding prohibited activities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar
Of course, other systems since have used different approaches including the French Revolution attempting to create a decimal calendar of 10-weeks.
Most calendar systems are lunisolar with the sun's position determining year length and the moon's phase determining month length. Reckoning weeks was more or less optional and of little interest.
And since prehistory is, by definition, before anything was recorded we can only speculate from limited findings how, or even if, time was recorded. It seems likely that some tribal leader made scratches on something to tally lunar months and maybe solar years.
@lePetomaneAncien @freemo thanks for the share. Every interesting.
Im not so much curious how far back 7-day weeks go but how long the weekdays we know have been aligned. How long has Sunday fallen on Sundays.
My curiosity is about religious communities. They deem Sunday, or in some cases Saturday, as religious days.. but if you go back far enough did Sundays at one point in the past fall on what would have been a Tuesday?
I know we had a shift in dates and so when you hear an ancient date it sometimes isnt the correct date according to modern counting of dates (shifted by a few days)... I wonder if something similar happened with religious Sundays where in the past it may have been a different day shifted a bit.
@freemo @sgul Ah! Let me attempt to answer your actual question a bit more directly.
The Jewish people adopted the Babylonian calendar systems during the Babylonian Exile so for Western purposes we can mark the observance of the Sabbath and a 7-day cycle beginning sometime around 600 BCE. Of course every lunisolar calendar requires intercalary "leap" days to reconcile the lunar and solar cycles so "counting by Sundays" isn't easy over very long timeframes.
The last major revision to the Western calendar was, as others have noted, the switch from Julian to Gregorian, a process that took a couple centuries.
Would you say from a scientific perspective it is fair to say that which day of the week is Sunday, at this point, is arbitrary and doesn't really line up with any ancient idea of "Sunday" other than by name?
@freemo @sgul You probably could, as an exercise, extrapolate calendar systems forward and backward in time then attempt to align them. Any system that used a 7-day weekly cycle would allow aligning by weeks to "line up the Sundays." The hard part is that each system used a different approach to intercalary days to correct slippage.
@lePetomaneAncien @freemo seems like the result of some sort of a cyclical event.The Cannanite script and Babylonian obsession with measurement leading to the invention of the days of the week.
@lePetomaneAncien @sgul @freemo iirc (no I'm not really that old) the Babylonians also had multiples of 60 which still reflected a bit into some of our recent systems like seconds and minutes and degrees.
Certainly as far back as the Sumerians and Babylonians, but possibly China got there before. It'd be anywhere where you need to be able to count and your society is organised and in a position to do that.
@freemo Last Thursday. Around lunchtime.
@freemo Depends on who you're talking about regarding the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. For example:
> Russia switched in 1918 and Greece in 1923. Because these countries waited so long, they had to skip over 13 days.
@freemo Another fun one:
> During the French Revolution, meanwhile, leaders in France decided to purge their calendars of any religious overtones. The new French Republican calendar, adopted in 1792, had 12 identical months of 30 days. Weeks had 10 days in them. And there were five or six extra days at the end of each year for holidays. The calendar also renamed the months, with monikers like Brumaire or Thermidor.
@freemo I can highly recommend @EverythingEverywhere's podcast episode about the topic, too (and every other episode there anyway):
https://everything-everywhere.com/the-julian-and-gregorian-calendars/
@freemo pretty sure it was two weeks ago.
@freemo Somewhere sometime Roman time?