93
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
93 points (96.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43777 readers
938 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The moon has been around a long long time. Everyone figured that out long before recorded history. Every culture dealt with it differently. Each phase was 7.4 days long. So each phase was countable as a 7 day week but an adjustment day is needed somewhere. It could be every 2 weeks, it could be end of the month, whatever. 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.
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.