Asklemmy

43850 readers

1033 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Where in history is the reference point of modern week day countdown? [SOLVED] (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I mean, if today i.e. is Sunday then someone long time ago should have said "Today will be Sunday" for the first time in a period from today that is multiple of seven. I was assuming that it was Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582, but looks like he is not. I failed in googling and duckduckgoing out the answer, so I ask for Lemmy's collective wisdom!

EDIT: so question is not about the origin of 7-day week and sequence of weekday names, but about the exact reference point (day) of today’s weekday countdown. From when have people stopped adding or ommiting any adjustment 'out-of-week' days (like in Babylon or Rome) and kept counting to seven till today? In other words, there should be a point exactly N x 7 days ago from which the 7-day countdown has not been interrupted. Or at least the earliest known day in history that everyone on Earth agreed upon as a reference point

EDIT 2: Solved by https://lemmy.world/comment/1852458 Thanks everyone!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But the 7 days comes from the amount of time it takes to go from one visible lunar phase to another

I'm not arguing with that, but my question is different: where in history is the exact reference point (day) of today's weekday countdown? From when have people decided to stop adding or subtracting adjustment days and kept counting till today? The might have been some shifts along the way, but there should be a point exactly N x 7 days ago from which the 7-day countdown has not been interrupted. Or at least the earliest known day in history that everyone on Earth agreed upon as a reference point.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

You have to go back on a per-calendar basis. The Chinese calendar will have a different answer to this question than the European calendar, for example. It is likely that different calendar systems came up with continuous 7-day cycles at different times and in different cultures without referring to each other, because the 7-day cycle maps to their shared observations of the moon cycles.