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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

Another phenomenon I’ve found curious is the cross-cultural definition of a week as roughly a quarter moon, and correlated names for days of the week. [1]

  Sunday    Sun     Sōlis    Hēlíou     日曜日
  Monday    Moon    Lūnae    Selḗnēs    月曜日
  Tuesday   Mars    Mārtis   Áreōs      火曜日
  Wednesday Mercury Mercuriī Hermoû     水曜日
  Thursday  Jupiter Iovis    Diós       木曜日
  Friday    Venus   Veneris  Aphrodítēs 金曜日
  Saturday  Saturn  Sāturnī  Krónou     土曜日

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week

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There's some ... but I think it misses two really important ones (and this is just off the top of my head):

1. The Romans had an eight day "week"; and,

2. The mesoamericans had a 260 day "week" (or, at best, interlocking 13 and 20 day "weeks").

I think the 7-day week is more of a statement about how effective the Judeo-Christian culture has imposed a modern week on the rest of the world.

>The Romans had an eight day "week"; and,

The Beatles were Romans!

So were the B-52's, but only if you wanted to.

> I think the 7-day week is more of a statement about how effective the Judeo-Christian culture has imposed a modern week on the rest of the world.

The 7-day week originated in Sumerian Babylon culture from 2100 BC and has to do with quartering moon phases. I worry when seeing many things attributed to "Judeo-Christian culture" which actually originated from other cultures, many aspects of what's in "Judeo-Christian culture" including perhaps some of the key stories in the Old Testament like the Flood appear to have been copied or at least inspired by stories from Sumerian culture which was considered the 'high culture' of the region.

They definitely didn’t invent it, but I would say it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week & then most of the rest of the world after. It takes a religion with certain characteristics to accomplish that.

> it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week

How so? Constantinus was the one who committed to the change and the day names were after the Roman Gods. Even today, we're using Viking names, like today happens to be Odin's Day, tomorrow's going to be Thor's Day and the day after is going to be Freya's Day. I'm not sure it is reasonable or rational to "credit Christianity itself".

Constantine adopted a 7 day calendar a few years after adopting Christianity. Christians had already adopted that calendar from Jews.

As far as I understand from the Wikipedia article, this practice has spread directly from Judaism (7 days) through Christianity through the Roman Empire (which renamed the days according to the planets/gods) to all of these places. It's not clear from the article if perhaps the Ancient Greeks had a similar system already - but otherwise, the Indians and the Chinese adopted this system from Roman/Hellenistic sources between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, and other cultures around them adopted it from them slightly later.

Babylonians knew 7 planets and named each day of the week as ruled by a planet...

It had also been subdivided into planetary hours...

https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/7-days-week.html

These are more jargon imports that came bundled with the 7-day week after the Romans, and then Europe, popularized it after adopting it. As an analogy, you don't hear many other ways of naming tea and coffee across cultures.

Polish doesn't use those names, but a different system:

Poniedziałek (lit. After not working) Wtorek (not sure) Środa (also not sure) Czwartek (lit. the fourth) Piątek (possibly means drinking day?) Sobota (not sure) Niedziela (Not working)

‘Sobota’ resembles ‘sábado’ in Spanish and might refer to the Sabbath?

Those all loosely resemble the Russian names, and as the other commentator noted “Sobota” sounds a lot like “Sabbath”

> Piątek (possibly means drinking day?)

The word means "the fifth day", from piąty (fifth) rather than pić (to drink).

Wtorek (Tuesday) comes from wtóry, meaning "second".

Środa (Wednesday) is from środa, meaning “middle”.

Sobota (Saturday) is from Hebrew שַׁבָּת‎ (šabbāṯ), meaning the Sabbath.

Oh yeah, I guess I was tired and didnt make the connection

Wtorek probably means "the second day", and Środa means "middle". Piątek probably means "fifth".

With some exceptions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawukon_calendar

On Venus, a day is longer than a year.

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