Chinese week

A week is a unit of time equal to seven days. It is the standard time period used for short cycles of days in most parts of the world. The days are often used to indicate common work days and rest days, as well as days of worship. Weeks are often mapped against yearly calendars, but are typically not the basis for them, as weeks are not based on astronomy.

The modern seven-day week can be traced back to the Babylonians, who used it within their calendar. Other ancient cultures had different week lengths, including ten in Egypt and an eight-day week for Etruscans. The Etruscan week was adopted by the Ancient Romans, but they later moved to a seven-day week, which had spread across Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 321 AD, Emperor Constantine officially decreed a seven-day week in the Roman Empire, including making Sunday a public holiday. This later spread across Europe, then the rest of the world.

In English, the names of the days of the week are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In many languages, the days of the week are named after gods or planets visible to the eye. Such a week may be called a ''planetary week''. Certain weeks within a year may be designated for a particular purpose, such as Holy Week in Christianity, Golden Week in China, and National Family Week in Canada. More informally, certain groups may advocate awareness weeks, which are designed to draw attention to a certain subject or cause. The term "week" may also be used to refer to a sub-section of the week, such as the workweek and weekend.

Cultures vary in which days of the week are designated the first and the last, though virtually all have Saturday, Sunday or Monday as the first day. The Geneva-based ISO standards organization uses Monday as the first day of the week in its ISO week date system through the international ISO 8601 standard. Most of Europe and China consider Monday the first day of the week, most of North America and South Asia consider Sunday the first day, while Saturday is judged as the first day of the week in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Other regions are mixed, but typically observe either Sunday or Monday as the first day. The Christian and Jewish weeks begin on Sunday (a day of worship) and end with a sabbath day, both following the interpretation in the Hebrew Bible'' comes from the Old English ''wice'', ultimately from a Common Germanic ', from a root ' "turn, move, change". 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 seven-day week is named in many languages by a word derived from "seven". The archaism sennight ("seven-night") preserves the old Germanic practice of reckoning time by nights, as in the more common ''fortnight'' ("fourteen-night").sennight
at worldwidewords.org (retrieved 12 January 2017) Hebdomad and hebdomadal week both derive from the Greek ''hebdomás'' (, "a seven"). Septimana is cognate with the Romance terms derived from Latin '' septimana'' ("a seven").

Slavic has a formation '' *tъ(žь)dьnь'' (Serbian , Croatian tjedan, Ukrainian , Czech ''týden'', Polish ''tydzień''), from ''*tъ'' "this" + ''*dьnь'' "day". Chinese has 星期, as it were " planetary time unit".

Definition and duration

A week is defined as an interval of exactly seven days, so that, except when passing through daylight saving time transitions or leap seconds,
:1 week = 7 days = 168 hours = 10,080 minutes = 604,800 seconds.
With respect to the Gregorian calendar:
*1 Gregorian calendar year = 52 weeks + 1 day (2 days in a leap year)
*1 week = ≈ 22.9984% of an average Gregorian month

In a Gregorian mean year, there are 365.2425 days, and thus exactly or 52.1775 weeks (unlike the Julian year of 365.25 days or ≈ 52.1786 weeks, which cannot be represented by a finite decimal expansion). There are exactly 20,871 weeks in 400 Gregorian years, so was a just as was .

Relative to the path of the Moon, a week is 23.659% of an average lunation or 94.637% of an average quarter lunation.

Historically, the system of dominical letters (letters A to G identifying the weekday of the first day of a given year) has been used to facilitate calculation of the day of week.
The day of the week can be easily calculated given a date's Julian day number (JD, i.e. the integer value at noon UT):
Adding one to the remainder after dividing the Julian day number by seven (JD '' modulo'' 7 + 1) yields that date's ISO 8601 day of the week. For example, the Julian day number of is . Calculating yields , corresponding to . In 1973, John Conway deviced the Doomsday rule for mental calculation of the weekday of any date in any year.

Days of the week

The days of the week were named for the classical planets. This naming system persisted alongside an "ecclesiastical" tradition of numbering the days in ecclesiastical Latin beginning with ''Dominica'' (the Lord's Day) as the first day. 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.

The ordering of the weekday names is not the classical order of the planets (by distance in the planetary spheres model, nor, equivalently, by their apparent speed of movement in the night sky). Instead, the planetary hours systems resulted in succeeding days being named for planets that are three places apart in their traditional listing. This characteristic was apparently discussed in Plutarch in a treatise written in c. AD 100, which is reported to have addressed the question of ''Why are the days named after the planets reckoned in a different order from the actual order?'' (the text of Plutarch's treatise has been lost).

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 () and Old Church Slavonic (). Old Church Slavonic may have also modeled the name of Monday, , after the Latin . The ecclesiastical system became prevalent in Eastern Christianity, but in the Latin West it remains extant only in modern Icelandic, Galician, and Portuguese.

}
, he, יום שני, Yom sheni, second day
, he, יום שלישי, Yom shlishi, third day
, he, יום רביעי, Yom revi'i, fourth day
, he, יום חמישי, Yom chamishi, fifth day
, he, יום שישי, Yom shishi, sixth day
, he, שבת, Shabbat, Rest/cessation

History

Ancient Near East

The earliest evidence of an astrological significance of a seven-day period is connected to Gudea, the priest-king of Lagash in Sumer during the Gutian dynasty (about 2100 BCE), who built a seven-room temple, which he dedicated with a seven-day festival. In the flood story of the Assyro-Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the storm lasts for seven days, the dove is sent out after seven days, and the Noah-like character of Utnapishtim leaves the ark seven days after it reaches the firm ground.

Counting from the new moon, the Babylonians celebrated the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th as "holy days", also called "evil days" (meaning inauspicious for certain activities). On these days, officials were prohibited from various activities and common men were forbidden to "make a wish", and at least the 28th was known as a "rest day".
On each of them, offerings were made to a different god and goddess.

Judaism

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 BC at the latest.

There are several hypotheses concerning the origin of the biblical seven-day cycle.

Friedrich Delitzsch and others suggested that the seven-day week being approximately a quarter of a lunation is the implicit astronomical origin of the seven-day week,
and indeed the Babylonian calendar used intercalary days to synchronize the last week of a month with the new moon. According to this theory, the Jewish week was adopted from the Babylonians while removing the moon-dependency.

George Aaron Barton speculated that the seven-day creation account of Genesis is connected to the Babylonian creation epic, Enûma Eliš, which is recorded on seven tablets.

In a frequently-quoted suggestion going back to the early 20th century, the Hebrew ''Biblical Sabbath#Etymology, Sabbath'' is compared to the Sumerian ''sa-bat'' "mid-rest", a term for the full moon. The Sumerian term has been reconstructed as rendered ''Sapattu^m'' or ''Sabattu^m'' in Babylonian language, Babylonian, possibly present in the lost fifth tablet of the Enûma Eliš, tentatively reconstructed "[Sa]bbath shalt thou then encounter, mid[month]ly".

However, Niels-Erik Andreasen, Jeffrey H. Tigay, and others claim that the Biblical Sabbath is mentioned as a day of rest in some of the earliest layers of the Pentateuch dated to the 9th century BC at the latest, centuries before the Babylonian exile of Judah. They also find the resemblance between the Biblical Sabbath and the Babylonian system to be weak. Therefore, they suggest that the seven-day week may reflect an independent Israelites, Israelite tradition. Tigay writes:

It is clear that among neighboring nations that were in position to have an influence over Israel – and in fact which did influence it in various matters – there is no precise parallel to the Israelite Sabbatical week. This leads to the conclusion that the Sabbatical week, which is as unique to Israel as the Sabbath from which it flows, is an independent Israelite creation.

The seven-day week seems to have been adopted, at different stages, by the Persian Empire, in Hellenistic astrology, and (via Hellenistic period, Greek transmission) in Gupta India and Tang China.
The Babylonian system was received by the Greeks in the 4th century BC (notably via Eudoxus of Cnidus). However, the designation of the seven days of the week to the seven planets is an innovation introduced in the time of Augustus. The astrological concept of planetary hours is rather an original innovation of Hellenistic astrology, probably first conceived in the 2nd century BC.

The seven-day week was widely known throughout the Roman Empire by the 1st century AD, along with references to the Jewish Sabbath by Roman authors such as Seneca the Younger, Seneca and Ovid. 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 cycle, nundinal system. The nundinal system had probably fallen out of use by the time Emperor Constantine the Great, Constantine adopted the seven-day week for official use in CE 321, making the Sunday, Day of the Sun () a legal holiday.

Achaemenid period

The Zoroastrian calendar follows the Babylonian in relating the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of the month to Ahura Mazda.Boyce, Mary (ed. & trans.). ''Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism''. University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 19-20.
The forerunner of all modern Zoroastrian calendars is the system used to determine dates in the Achaemenid Empire, Persian Empire, adopted from the Babylonian calendar by the 4th century BC.

Frank Senn, 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 BC, after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon.
While the seven-day week in Judaism is tied to Genesis creation narrative, Creation account in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible

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