NakedScience.com is about science and logic which have been deemed cool by its author.

It is copyright Michael Curtis 2011

Why are there 7 Days in a Week?

Below is that 'counting 24 to reach each day of the week' thingy that I mentioned earlier.

Scrolling down it, you see that every 24th item is a known day of the week occurring at the correct position within Sun/Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri/Sat.

I try not to talk much about Norse gods like Thor representing (and sounding like) Thursday. I would then have to match up Norse gods with Roman or Greek gods and I would not want to state with certainty that the Norse use of 7 days comes from the Romans.

A bloke called Gerald Massey mentions, in Norse legend, 'The seven who slumbered and forgot' as stars like the Pole star which are part of an astronomical thing called precession. If I read it correctly, he reckoned that '7 planets' is a misinterpretation of another occurrence of 7 in the sky: 7 stars of precession. Precession takes a lot longer than a week to happen. So the Babylonian astronomers would have really needed a good knowledge of star movements over time to have come up with that idea.

I stumbled upon that writer when watching a movie by Peter Joseph which, over 11 minutes in, starts comparing religious stories with the end of super long nights and the return to nicer seasons.

Hang on, Saturday! That's where the list started. So, go back to the top and expect Sunday to come next in the cycle!

They must have loved the calculation 7 x 24 = 168 to be measuring it so.. religiously.

Maybe they were really interested in Venus which, to an observer, seems to orbit the sun every 584 days.

Every 104 lots of venus orbits (roughly!!), you get 360 lots of 168.

Or, if you like 365 rather than 360 as your 'year in days' figure, ...

Every 105 lots of venus orbits, you get 365 lots of 168.

In other words, the times table of venus orbits has a date in the future when a times table of Earth orbits around the sun intersect [168 'approximate a real year' years].

If that were true then I would expect 104 or 105 to be popular numbers in old astronomy (Primary 105-Year Age of Seth and Mayan 104-Year Venus Round).

(I was using '168 days' and 'Astronomy' on a search engine, found an article about Venus and the Maya calendar, did a 'times table' spreadsheet until I found 105 (which is an interesting whole number result of dividing multiples of Venus's 584 by '24 lots of 7 days total above' of 168); then I search engined 105 and Astronomy, etc. ; and that's how I found the article about 104 and 105.). You might think it's spurious but, like I said, I like playing with numbers (and I doubt I'm alone in that)!

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