The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week"Days, months, and years were given to us by nature, but we invented the week for ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about a seven-day cycle, or about any other kind of week; it represents an arbitrary rhythm imposed on our activities, unrelated to anything in the natural order. But where the week exists—and there have been many cultures where it doesn't—it is so deeply embedded in our experience that we hardly ever question its rightness, or think of it as an artificial convention; for most of us it is a matter of 'second nature.' |
Contents
Daddy Whats Thursday? | 1 |
CHAPTER ONE The Origins of the SevenDay Week | 5 |
CHAPTER TWO The SevenDay Wars | 27 |
CHAPTER THREE Cultural Variations on a Theme | 44 |
CHAPTER FOUR The Harmonics of Timekeeping | 60 |
CHAPTER FIVE Living with the Week | 83 |
CHAPTER SIX Experiencing the Week | 107 |
CHAPTER SEVEN Culture Not Nature | 130 |
Notes | 142 |
Bibliography | 172 |
Author Index | 191 |
| 199 | |
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Common terms and phrases
364-day calendar activities actually ancient associated astrological astrological week Babylonian Baha'i Book of Jubilees calen Calendar Reform Central American Christian Church Colson Continuous Working Week cultural Dead Sea Scrolls Décadi distinctive divinatory Dominical Letters essentially example fact festivals five-day French Republican calendar Friday Hidden Rhythms History ibid Indonesian International Fixed Calendar Jewish Jewish week Jews Journal of Calendar Jubilees Judaism Jupiter London Lord's Day lunar market week Mathiez Maya Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Mercury Monday month Moon namely night obviously original Paris particular days Patterns period planetary planets precise multiples Qumran regard regular Religion Rest Days Roman routine Sabbath Saturday Saturn schedule seven seven-day cycle seven-day week significance social solar Sorokin Soviet Sunday temporal Thursday tion tonalamatl traditional Tuesday University Press Venus Webster Wednesday week-calendar weekday weekend weekly cycle weekly day weekly rhythm West Africa workweek World Calendar York Zerubavel