Free The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan Page B

Indeed, the seven-day system was already ancient by Constantine’s day. It seems to have originated circa 700 BC in Babylon, when astrologers assigned their planet-gods to the days of the week--names the Romans replaced with their own planet-gods. For instance, the day of Nabu, the Babylonian god of the scribes, became in Latin the day of Mercurius, the Roman god of communication--and today survives as mercredi in French, miercoles in Spanish, and so forth across the spectrum of Romance languages (see chart below).
    In English, however, the day of Nabu is known as Wednesday because of a curious twist of history: the fact that the seven-day week did not penetrate to Britain until the era of the Anglo-Saxon conquests in the fifth century. At that time the invaders wanted to take on certain Roman trappings but clung to their own pagan religion and gods. So Nabu in Babylon became Mercurius in Rome and Woden--the German (and Viking) god of poetry--in Britain. Centuries later this Mesopotamian-Roman-German-British astrological connection has spread to dozens of countries around the world, as people from Hong Kong to Harare pay homage to otherwise forgotten gods every time they mention the word Wednesday.
     

     
    Astrology was so influential in the ancient world that 7 became a kind of mystical number. This was evident not only in the seven-day week but also in the so-called seven ages of man. The astronomer Ptolemy, among others, believed that these ages were tied to the seven planets and their orbits in the earth-centred universe. According to his cosmology, infancy is ruled by the moon, childhood by Mercury, adolescence by Venus, youth by the sun, manhood by Mars, middle age by Jupiter and old age by Saturn. The planets and the number seven were also associated with good and evil omens affecting winds, rain, fair sailing, good crops, bets at the chariot races, warfare and birthdays, for instance in this nursery rhyme:
    Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for its living,
And the child that’s born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
    Recently chronobiologists have discovered that the seven-day cycle, like the sleep cycle of days and nights, may also have biological precedents. They say that certain biorhythms in the human body work on seven-day cycles, including variations in heartbeat, blood pressure and response to infection. The potential for rejection of a transplanted organ seems to peak at seven-day intervals. Other organisms, including bacteria, share these basic biorhythms. Possibly this faint tick of biology may be one reason that Mesopotamians, Romans and numerous other cultures, from the Incas of Peru to the Bantu of central and southern Africa, have shaped their activities around a week of 5 to 10 days.
     
    Astrology was responsible for yet another curiosity in our weekly calendar: the order of the days. We take the order of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so forth for granted, but in fact it does not correspond to the ancient understanding of the solar system, which put Saturn farthest from the earth, followed in descending order by Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the moon. The discrepancy between this order and the arrangement of our week conies from another invention from Mesopotamia: the division of the day into 24 equal units of time.
    The order of the day names themselves comes from ancient Mesopotamian astrologers’ attaching a planet-god to preside over each hour of the day, arranged according to their correct cosmological order. For instance, Saturn controlled the first hour of Saturn’s day (Saturday), followed in its second hour by Jupiter, then by Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the moon. In the eighth hour the cycle started again with Saturn, and the progression repeated until the twenty-fourth