Week
In AD 321, Emperor Constantine the Great officially decreed a seven-day week in the Roman Empire, including making Sunday a public holiday.
Prior to 2000, Saturday was judged as the first day of the week in much of the Middle East and North Africa due to the Islamic influence; however, this is no longer the case.
The Germanic word probably had a wider meaning prior to the adoption of the Roman calendar, perhaps "succession series", as suggested by Gothic wikō translating taxis "order" in Luke 1:8.
The archaism sennight ("seven-night") preserves the old Germanic practice of reckoning time by nights, as in the more common fortnight ("fourteen-night").
The Greco-Roman gods associated with the classical planets were rendered in their interpretatio germanica at some point during the late Roman Empire, yielding the Germanic tradition of names based on indigenous deities.
[11] Ravivāra/Bhānuvāsara/Ādityavāra Somavāra/ Induvāsara Saumyavāsara Sthiravāsara An ecclesiastical, non-astrological, system of numbering the days of the week was adopted in Late Antiquity.
This model also seems to have influenced (presumably via Gothic) the designation of Wednesday as "mid-week" in Old High German (mittawehha) and Old Church Slavonic (срѣда, srěda, literally, middle day).
Old Church Slavonic may have also modeled the name of Monday, понєдѣльникъ (literally, '"the day after Sunday), after the Latin feria Secunda.
[12] The ecclesiastical system became prevalent in Eastern Christianity, but in the Latin West it remains extant only in modern Icelandic, Galician, and Portuguese.
[15] Gudea, the priest-king of Lagash in Sumer during the Gutian dynasty (about 2100 BCE), built a seven-room temple, which he dedicated with a seven-day festival.
[20] 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 BCE at the latest.
[25] In a frequently-quoted suggestion going back to the early 20th century,[26] the Hebrew Sabbath is compared to the Sumerian sa-bat "mid-rest", a term for the full moon.
[29][31]The seven-day week seems to have been adopted, at different stages, by the Persian Empire, in Hellenistic astrology, and (via Greek transmission) in Gupta India and Tang China.
Although some sources, such as the Encyclopædia Britannica,[33] state that the Babylonians named the days of the week after the five planets, the sun, and the moon, many scholars disagree.
Eviatar Zerubavel says, "the establishment of a seven-day week based on the regular observance of the Sabbath is a distinctively Jewish contribution to civilization.
[37] When the seven-day week came into use in Rome during the early imperial period, it did not immediately replace the older eight-day nundinal system.
[38] The nundinal system had probably fallen out of use by the time Emperor Constantine adopted the seven-day week for official use in CE 321, making the Day of the Sun (dies Solis) a legal holiday.
Frank C. Senn in his book Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical points to data suggesting evidence of an early continuous use of a seven-day week; referring to the Jews during the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE,[22] after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon.
The ancient Romans traditionally used the eight-day nundinum but, after the Julian calendar had come into effect in 45 BCE, the seven-day week came into increasing use.
The association of the days of the week with the Sun, the Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye dates to the Roman era (2nd century).
[48] The earliest known reference in Chinese writings to a seven-day week is attributed to Fan Ning, who lived in the late 4th century in the Jin dynasty, while diffusions from the Manichaeans are documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yi Jing and the Ceylonese or Central Asian Buddhist monk Bu Kong of the 7th century (Tang dynasty).
Surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara Michinaga show the seven-day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007.
[citation needed] Shashi (2000) mentions the Garga Samhita, which he places in the 1st century BCE or CE, as a possible earlier reference to a seven-day week in India.
[49][50] The seven-day weekly cycle has remained unbroken in Christendom, and hence in Western history, for almost two millennia, despite changes to the Coptic, Julian, and Gregorian calendars, demonstrated by the date of Easter Sunday having been traced back through numerous computistic tables to an Ethiopic copy of an early Alexandrian table beginning with the Easter of 311 CE.
There are many later variants of this, including the German Bauern-Praktik and the versions of Erra Pater published in 16th- to 17th-century England, mocked in Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
[53] Medieval Christian traditions associated with the lucky or unlucky nature of certain days of the week survived into the modern period.
Sunday, sometimes personified as Saint Anastasia, was itself an object of worship in Russia, a practice denounced in a sermon extant in copies going back to the 14th century.
The same is true of the Italian phrase oggi otto (literally "today eight"), the French à huitaine, and the Spanish de hoy en ocho.
Calendars unrelated to the Chaldean, Hellenistic, Christian, or Jewish traditions often have time cycles between the day and the month of varying lengths, sometimes also called "weeks".
The traditional names of the seven day week continued to be used, including "Resurrection" (Воскресенье) for Sunday and "Sabbath" (Суббота) for Saturday, despite the government's official atheism.
