From the Vault: The Seven Day Week, Part 1

here you go with the beginning of it. Welcome to s About to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Rob Today, I wanted to start off by hitting you with one of my tenth greater thoughts. All right, let's have it. What do you guys? This is an idea had in high school. I can't remember if I've ever talked about

this with you or not. Maybe maybe, maybe not, But anyway, I remember when I was in sophomore year of high school, I was sitting in a U S history class and I was suddenly hit with a notion it was very much like a like a stoner thought, though of course I was. I was a very good boy, and I was very sober in class. But um my thought was, wait a second, why do we think about history in terms of multiples of ten years? So in terms of decades and centuries and I guess millennia, but primarily decades

and centuries. Why are those like the units of time on which historical trends are judged to make sense or or be valid. And if we used a different base counting system, like if we didn't have ten fingers and thus didn't count with base ten, would we think about history in a totally different way with different sort of groups of associations if it was like, you know, on the basis of sixty three year periods or or eighteen year periods or something like that. Yeah, like what what

would the nine seventies be without without decades? You know, how would we think about that time period? What would be the um you know, the barriers to it? And

how would we package that up? And I guess I'm still prone to this kind of thinking because the idea that I started uh getting getting really interested in like last week was another question basically along the same lines, which is like, how are we affected by the the time units that we use to organize our lives And if those time units were actually different lengths of time,

how different would our lives be? And this is going to lead into the subject that we're going to be looking at for the next couple of episodes at least, who knows how many we'll go to. But but right we're getting into the subject of the week. And I think this this one has a really interesting peg because if you think about the major units of time that divide our lives from say like day length and above. So the day is of course twenty four hours long, and it is roughly the time it takes the Earth

to make one full rotation on its axis. But then you've also got the year. The year is of course, you know, it's three six five days, and this is roughly the time it takes the Earth to make one full orbit around the Sun. And then you've got the months, and the month also has an astronomical basis this one

a little more roughly than the other two. There there's a there's a larger difference, but you know, our months are roughly thirty days long, and it takes roughly thirty days for the moon to complete one full orbit around the Earth. I think it's like twenty nine point five three days or something. And then of course we we make up for that with little adjustments, you different numbers

of days and stuff like that. Yeah, and now at this point is probably worth remembering here for every for everybody, that most ancient calendars were based on direct observation. So uh so, yeah, it makes total sense that these uh, you know, a lot of these ideas about how we should divide out our time are based on what we're observing, saying the night sky, sure, and there are somewhere. It's

pretty much inevitable. I mean, like you, we kind of can't help but organize ourselves around day lengths, right, because like what time of day it is or time of night makes a dramatic difference on the way we interact with our environment because of things like temperature and light, so that that's almost just totally imposed on us. We

really have no choice but to live by days and nights. Uh. You could make the case that maybe months are different, but but you know, there's some natural rhythms that come with the lunar cycle, and uh, and and certainly there are things that come with the yearly cycle because of say, like the rotations of harvests and the seasons and stuff.

But then we come to the week. We look at look at the seven day week, and if you look for the seven day week and the stars and the planets or the movement of the earth, you come up with absolutely nothing. The closest I've seen is that some people have said, well, uh, the seven day week is a fairly rough quarterly division of the lunar month. So if you take the length of a month and you divide it by four, that gets you close to seven days.

That's like the closest whole number. Uh. But but then again, like why would you do that? Like why would you not divide the month by five or divide the month by six or something else. So so I don't think that the length of the week is really something that you can say naturally flows from anything that is physically true about the world. I think we'd have to say though there might be you know, historical, cultural, religious reasons that feed into it. It's it's a somewhat are a

treary length. It's based on culture, and it's a human invention it's not just a a an approximation of something that's happening in the skies, right, and and I believe, I believe all the evidence where we've looked at really backs that up. Though It's always worth remembering that if you stray too far into the wilds of numerology just about anything, it's possible, right. Sure. I'm always reminded of the bid and Um. I forget which number too echo

work it was. It might have been fucos pendulum. It might have been one of his essays. Perhaps you remember this Joe where he's um he's talking about like all the various numerology computations about the Great Pyramids and how those you know, numbers relate to other aspects of life. And the example was made that you can also torture the numbers enough regarding I want to say, a phone booth or something h even something far more mundane compared

to the Pyramids. But yeah, if you start getting wild with what numbers mean and so forth, then you can go crazy with that as well. Yeah. I think the way I'd put it is that if you look hard enough for patterns, you can find patterns in anything, and that includes numbers. And like numerical relationships and say, like the ratios of length and width of objects in the world, or the length of different periods of time within one

another and stuff. Yeah, I mean, you can always find patterns if you look hard enough, and some people work

really hard. But as far as meaningful patterns and meaningful connections, yeah, yeah, I think I think almost all the evidence we're looking at here today and the next episode, uh, you know, comes back to the fact that, yes, seven seems to be this thing that is not written in the in the heavens, and and it isn't even like really written inside us either, but it's something that emerges from other directions, which we'll get into, right, So I don't know that

that start me is just like a really interesting fact that our lives are guided by this this seven day length of time, that we organize our lives into these blocks of seven days, and that so much what we do is based on the recurrence of those blocks and the timing of the days within those blocks. And yet it's not a necessary fact of nature. So what is the seven day week? Where does it come from? How culturally unique or culturally universal is it um? And what

is it doing? To us, like how does it work on our brains? And how does it change the way we live? And it is hard to imagine, you know, certainly for us, it's it's hard to imagine living without the seven day week, Uh, just because we're in it. It's kind of like trying to imagine recent history without decades. It's like it's just such a part of the fabric.

It's the this grid that we've we've we've we've we've laid across reality, and it's just like, how how would we function if we didn't have Monday's, Tuesday's, Wednesday, Thursdays, Friday, Saturdays and Sundays. You can't take my Wednesdays away from me? Yeah, if we don't have the hump day, right, the magical hunt day that is the day where our victory over the week be a parent on Tuesday, I guess you

know that it just seems impossible. Well, so, I want to say, one of the first things I read on this subject when when I was first getting interested in it last week, actually was an article in Eon magazine by a UC Berkeley professor of history named David Hankin, who has written on this subject, who has written on the artificiality of the week and it's and it's cultural precedents and effects. And he starts off this Eon article

by mentioning something. So you may have noticed, I think, especially like in but maybe more commonly over the last two years, a lot of kind of hack jokes on the internet, uh, made especially by the subset of people who had previously been working in an office but then we're lucky enough to be able to convert to working from home during the pandemic. And the joke was, nobody knows what day it is, Like I, I can't keep track of days. Every day is the same, it's blurs.

Day is the yuck yuck expression. Uh. And and I noticed that this connects to things in some movies, like you remember there's a scene in The Big Lebowski where um, where I think Jeff Bridge's landlord comes to him and is telling him what day something's gonna happen. Maybe is when he's gonna come see his dance recital or something, and uh, and he says what day it is? And um uh, and it's clear that you know that the dude does not know what day of the week it is.

And this is like a standard uh deployment of this observation about a person, somebody who doesn't know what day of the week it is is usually taken to be sort of disoriented or disconnected from society or maybe unproductive. Yeah yeah, um, and you know you can make that argument for the dude, but I don't know for my own part. I would say there are rare moments, perhaps during say vacation or travel, where I might have to

remind myself what day it is. More commonly, however, I'll find that if there's a disruption in the week, it may momentarially feel like today is a different day, you know, like, um, if it's a Monday on a three day weekend, then that Monday kind of feels like a Sunday. But these feelings generally don't hold up to even halfway you know, close scrutiny. You know, it's it's one of those things

that immediately fades away. Um. So yeah, I you certainly encounter it in media and you hear people make jokes about it, but generally, I feel like the calendar mindset is not far away. Well, I mean, the fact that people were like posting on Twitter about this often enough in that it was a thing people. It was a trend people could observe seem to mean something. And I think the standard assumption, the widely presumed explanation, was that

telecommuting was to blame. This is because, oh, well, now a larger percentage of people are telecommuting. But you know, more people were telecommuting than had been before, and people who were freshly telecommuting, uh, we're we're experiencing this. I don't know what day it is feeling as a result. But Hankin actually goes back against that and says that he doesn't see telecommuting as a as a very good

explanation for people since of the days blurring together. And I have to say, as as somebody who often worked from home even before COVID, that has never been my experience of telecommuting, and I I also would be skeptical of that explanation. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, though part of that might be that we're typically I mean, I think we've always been part of a publication schedule, so uh, you know, there's always what day it is still matters even if you're not in the office, at

least in our line of work. Sure, but I would I would think that would generally hold true with a lot of different professions. Yeah, And the point that Hankin makes at least is that telecommuting really disrupts normal divisions of time within the day more than does across the span of a week. Right, So, like it doesn't change usually which days of the week people were working. I mean, it might in some cases, but that's not generally understood to be how it worked. It would change like where

you were working within the day. Um, And of course nobody was complaining about like not knowing what hour of the day it was. And it's also interesting that the line was not I don't know what day of the month it was, it was I don't know what day of the week it is. And ultimately the explanation that he gives is that quote, weekly counts are reinforced by the habits and rituals of other people. When those habits and rituals were radically obscured or altered in the week,

itself seemed to unravel. And I think I agree here. This seems likely to me that for people who felt this way, like I don't know what day of the week it is, I would suspect it probably had less to do with telecommuting, and more to do with the disruption in schedules of other things that people would normally

do at regular, recurring times throughout the week. So maybe for example, recurring social get togethers or classes, or religious gatherings, or going out to dinner on Saturday night or things like that. You know, people have pretty strong weekly rituals. Not everybody obviously, but lots of people do. And when when those things get interrupted, I think that probably has

a strong effect on reckoning with the cycle itself. Yeah, I think that makes sense because obviously there are two To a certain degree, many people were able to transition these things into the like the zoom age. They're able to, you know, do their game night online to to turn a particular in person social hour into a virtual social hour. But in other cases things simply went away, um you know,

after school practices and so forth. You know, in many cases these just didn't happen for a year or more. You know, there's a totally different thing that I wonder

about that. It makes me wonder if if, um, confusing which day it is in the week has become maybe a little more common in recent years, and this would have nothing to do with the pandemic, but it would be um shifts in patterns of media consumption among people getting a lower percentage on average of their media from scheduled live broadcasts that are that occur at regular dates and days and times throughout a week, like you know, you know that the TV show that you like comes

on at this time on this day, and instead shifting towards more on demand uh consumption of media or just algorithmically supplied media entertainment, which is, you know, always there waiting for you and always on, rather than scheduled at particular days and times. Mm. So that sounds like a point in favor of what are they calling? And now I'll meant television versus uh, like you know, just a binge streaming and so forth. Oh, finally it's Friday and

I can watch this trash I've been waiting on. Well, you know, growing up very much in the TV age, I mean, I remember that feeling that you know, it's it's it's Friday or Saturday night, you know exactly you know what, uh, you know what's going to be on television Sunday morning, you know, you know what's gonna be on then uh, you know there's a different character or

whatever's on TV. And if you did not have a clock and did not have access to clock time, you could tell if you know what you're doing, you know what time it was, just based on what's happening on NBC or what's happening on TVs. Uh, what what happens to be playing on MTV, that sort of thing. I'm not going to forget it Saturday because I know that that at one am on the USA network, I'm gonna

get to watch Friday the thirteenth, Part eight. Yeah. Well, this this is a leads to an interesting question that I don't think we did not We certainly did not prepared to answer. Are there any franchises that that have seven entries, like an even seven? Oh? And then they've said definitely no more ever, any one for each day, and that's it. I don't know. Are we at transfer seven yet? I've just looked it up. Now we're at transfer six, So one more and then we're good, okay,

than than than well. So another question comes up though from this, which is, um, okay, so seven days is not strictly speaking a a time period that we derive from astronomy or from anything physical that happens in the world around us. It seems to be a cultural invention. Um. But but could it possibly be based in some other natural fact about the world other than say, you know, the moon or the sun or the Earth. Could could a period of seven days somehow lie within biology? Yeah?

I was wondering about this as well. You know, is is there anything that might connect the idea of the seven day week to the biological world, particularly to human biology? And I found uh an interesting and at times perplexing at least to me paper flexing to me anyway. Uh, paper that was published in twenty six in the journal Chronobiology International by Rheinberg at All titled seven day Human Biological Rhythms An Expedition in search of their origin, synchronization,

functional advantage, adaptive value and clinical relevance. This paper aims to look at the quote seven day domain of the biological time structure with special reference to human beings. Okay, so it seems like they're investigating exactly the question we just raised, like, could there be any kind of rhythm within the body of things that tend to happen in

cycles of seven days or so? Right? And uh? And you know, first of all they do say this is from the conclusions they stay quote, neither cosmic nor earthborn signals seemed to be of sufficient strength to give rise to the seven day rhythms of life forms of various degrees of complexity. All right, fair enough that that matches up with what we've said so far, particularly as far

as the heavens go. However, they also conclude that the evidence quote motivates us to hypothesize weekly rhythms are endogenous in origin. So, in other words, these researchers still think that there is something about the power of seven that emerges from within us. So they admit that the seven

day biological cycle is a little studied. But but they make a point of saying what it does seem to factor into various organisms, And they cite a list of examples, including things like laboratory rats, domestic horses, and seemingly to some degree, human beings. Though I should say that these examples, like for example, with the horse, the example is a study on seven day cycles in semen volume, sperm motility

and supermatozoa concentration. Uh. And not not to say that all all them are sperm related, but you know it's it's things related to various processes inside of biological system. Well, I guess if it's domestic horses and animals living within human environments, I would be a little curious whether any appearance seven day cycles could somehow be based on something that's changing within their environment on the basis of human and behavior, because humans live by seven day cycles or

not all humans do. But I'd imagine that the animals used in the study probably belong to humans that do right, and all scientists are humans. So um, yeah, this is definitely an area where I would I would love to read more on this topic and read some you know, some some work from other researchers as well. Um, I don't really know quite what to make of this paper because on one hand, I am not it's intended audience, and I may be missing something important in their their

arguments here, So that's always certainly a possibility. But I'm not sure how much stock I put in the concept that there is something about seven day time period that emerges within us, because for starters, I'm not sure it really lines up with the history that we're going to be discussing in this episode. In the next uh, you know, seven becomes the standard and it wins out over other models. But I'm not sure it's because it match something inside us.

I think they're there are other stronger arguments to be made for other factors. Well, I don't know. Maybe we can revisit this paper later if we if we get some additional clarity on it. But but also maybe we can trudge out of the swamp of confusion, but by focusing on something a little more understandable in the moment, which is the question of Okay, just in in basic functional terms, what does the week actually do? What do

we use the seven day week for? Hinkin actually outlines four different things that he thinks the seven day week does, and so I want to go through these with you, rob. Okay, So the first one would be categorizing days into different types. So the week organizes time into blocks of two fundamental kind of days, week days and weekends, with the main distinctions between the two being, um being the distinction between

work and leisure and the distinction between mundane and sacred. Yeah, and you know you see this reflect like even if if you were, say, someone who does not work, maybe you're retired or you have a particular work schedule that sets you apart from from many other people. Um, you still see it reflected, say in what sort of businesses are closed on the weekends, what sort of businesses are are going to be swamped on the weekend, and therefore

it's better to go on a weekday. So even if the cycles don't don't at first seem to impact you personally, that they still probably do to some degree anyway, exactly. So that's one thing we do. We we sort days into different kinds of days, and there's usually mainly just two kinds, but you could imagine other schemes of of

sorting days into different sort of buckets like that. Beyond that, I would say you could get more granular and and go to the second category, which is day individual ation, because of course we have week days and weekends, but also each day of the week is its own fundamental thing. Uh So we all we know that Tuesdays are not exactly the same as Mondays, and Saturdays are not exactly the same as Sundays. So each day becomes a distinct concept with its own connotations. And of course this can

be highly individualized. You know, Friday for some people maybe more of a celebration day the beginning of the weekend. Others may see it as kind of a termination point for fulfilling work, you know, maybe even an unwanted termination point, like oh, I have to I have to not work for two days um. Or others may see it as a crunch day, like this is the day where everything that was stressful in the week is even more stressful and there's just not enough time in the day to

get it done. You know, there are a million different variations on everything I just said again, uh, the exact flavor of the day is going to vary from person to person, but they do end up having these separate flavors, these separate fields, even though the only thing different, you know, the only difference from the Monday and Tuesday is just how they relate to each other and to the rest

of the calendar system. Right. I was actually looking for scientific studies about how people feel about different days of the week, and I found one. Uh So, I found a study published in pl Os one in by David A. Ellis, Richard Wiseman, and Rob Jenkins called mental Representations of week Days. I was I was sure you were going to say this was a study by Garfield at all. I thought it was a joke. I thought you were setting me up.

It's a real study, Okay, go for it. Well, this study would suggest to Garfield that he is not alone. His his his feelings are born out in the broader population. So it was conducted by three psychologists in the UK and they were trying to draw out trends in how people conceptualize each of the days of the week as its own idea and how people react to those those ideas.

This used sampling tools over the internet, because of course, the weekly accounting schedule is going to be somewhat culturally contingent. I was looking, okay, well, where are the people who were answering these studies. It seems the majority of respondents appear to be based in UH in North America and Europe. And so in the first study, they were looking at which days do people get confused about? You know, when somebody's like, oh I thought it was one day, but

it's actually another. This might not be surprising, but they found that people were actually much more likely to confuse midweek days meaning Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for different days than they were to confuse other days for the wrong day. So you're way more likely to to think it's the wrong day when it's a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday than Wednesday, it's a Friday or a Monday. Second study looked at reaction times to see how quickly people could answer what

day of the week it is? That's a good question, right, uh, And they found that people's reaction times were fastest on Monday and Friday. So that would tend to suggest that Mondays and Fridays are the days when what day of the week it is is most highly represented in your brain, you're the most conscious of it and can answer immediately. Yeah. I mean basically comes down our things beginning, are things ending?

Are are we somewhere in the middle? Which it's interesting to think about that because we have such a linear understanding of time, you know, we we have such a narrative approach to understanding our own lives, it makes sense that that would relate to the to the work week as well, or just the week in general, like each week is a little story with a beginning and an ending, and also this middle bit which might be a bit muddled, right right, And speaking of muddling in in the third study,

they also found that participants had the least semantic associations, meaning they were able to come up with the fewest number of connotations and thoughts about the midweek days once again, Tuesday, Whence and Thursday. Other days of the week like Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, people could come up with more thoughts about. Another thing they looked at was affective norms, how people feel when

asked to think about individual days of the week. Again, this might not be surprising at all, but it does validate the Garfield experience because it turns out everyone hates Mondays, people feel strongly negative about Monday's, people feel strongly positive about Fridays, and then basically the other days in between appear to be graded on slopes towards those two extremes. So people are highest on a Friday, and then it goes down a little bit on Saturday, then more on Sunday.

Monday is the lowest, and then starting on Tuesday it starts to climb up again to get until it gets to Friday. Well, yeah, I don't know if I have much personal to relate on that. I feel like you can sort of find something nice to say about any given day. I feel lucky, you know, or if you look hard enough. But that's just my take. Well, I feel like that's one of those studies where that didn't really have any surprises in store, right, Like that, it's sort of what you would think, but it does at

least put some data behind those intuitions that. Yeah, like for us, like Fridays and Mondays are definitely more of a phenomenon than than Tuesdays or Wednesdays are, and we also have the correspondingly the strongest feelings about those days. And I would you know, I think they're probably pretty obvious reasons for that. I would be very surprised if the answer were not that it has something to do

with the work week. People like being done with work for the week, and people do not like having to go back to work for the week. Now, it's interesting to think back on the song Friday, I'm in Love by the Cure, because if I remember correctly, I don't think he has anything nice to say about any of the days of the week except for Friday, Yeah, the

day that he is in love. Oh you know, I just looked up the lyrics, and the way you explain it makes a lot more sense than how these were represented in my head because I always thought it was that Tuesday's great and Wednesday it too, And that was a strange thing to say, like like he's just trying to be nice, you know, He's like, I don't want to say bad things about Tuesday. Tuesday's Wednesday's fine. That would yeah, that would that would be I guess it

did a different song. Yeah, Thursday, I don't care about you. Oh, that would be a different cycle entirely because it's like Monday he's blue, but then yeah, Tuesday, he's over it. Wednesday, everything's going fine. Thursday he's so detached from the situation. But then he falls back in love again on Friday and begins the cycle once more. I still don't entirely understand the song, but it's a great song. Wait wait, but but I want to come back to Hankin's ideas

about what the week does for us. So we already talked about the categorization of types of days. You've got weekdays and weekends, and then you've got the individuation of each day. But then the next thing, I think this is a really important one. I would call it like time conceptualization. Uh, this is for mental time travel and for what Hankin calls stock taking. So one thing weeks do is that they give us blocks of time, blocks of seven days along which to organize our memories and

our anticipation of the near future. And this absolutely makes sense to me because I know I do this. I would say that for me, You know that the general present time, I think I represent mentally as about two weeks past and two weeks ahead, and I think of them as weeks. Yeah, I can relate to this as well. Like if if someone says, what are you doing ten days from now? I might not initially have an answer, but if if it's if the question is what are you doing Friday after next, well then I have a

little more to go on. Like that's a little more concrete and formed in my mind. In fact, it's almost kind of a mnemonic device, because if somebody says, hey, what have you been up to recently? I might often be kind of like, I don't know, you know, I can't think of what to say. But if someone says, what have you done this week? Somehow that kind of

spurs and answer more easily. Yeah, It's like, well, I was just generally generally kind of depressed, and then um, and then I totally forgot about the person I was in love with, and then I fell in love with him again. Oh yeah, okay, But so by by Hankin's scheme, that's three things the week does, and then finally it functions as a scheduling device. This might be the most practical of all three, which is that recurring events that need to happen roughly on the order of once every

seven days become of course, weekly events. So think about all the different kinds of things. You know, there are tons of things like this in life that feel right to do roughly once every week, and so you might schedule them with a day in the week. You know that tuesdays the day every week when you do X. Yeah. Yeah, Like with us, it's the grocery shopping, it's the it's

the cleaning of the house. These are things that are done on a weekly basis, and it would feel weird if we didn't do them now in some in this episode, but then I think also probably in in at least the next episode, we're going to be talking about the origins of the week as we know it and saying where the week came from is a little bit complicated because it depends on UH. For one thing, what counts

as a week? Are you saying, like our current continuous, unbroken cycle of seven day weeks, where did that come from? Or like, where does the concept of UH grouping blocks of days into you know, roughly seven but you know what would would an eight day block also count as a week? And and so forth? Um? And there are plenty of examples of things like that going way back in time. But Hankin argues that the history of our current system of seven day weeks goes back roughly two

thousand years. There are obviously earlier traditions that feed into it, but he writes that there were seven day cycles used for various religious and clatural purposes beforehand. But in the first century CE in Rome, this is the earliest evidence we have of quote any society using such cycles to track time in the form of a common calendar. So in the first century Roman Empire, the seven day week that we currently use grew out of a combination of

the Roman astrological organization of days. So you have seven days for seven planets or gods. And if you think about that, there were seven things that could be called planets. They're not all actually planets, but uh, but seven you know, moving bodies in the sky that are not just stars that were known by Romans because you could see them with the naked eye. So that was if you count them up, the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,

and Saturn, and that makes seven. Yeah, that's that's the best case I think one can make for an observation based astronomical reason for a seven day system. But the system, Yeah, in that case, it wouldn't actually be seven days, it's

just the number seven being something from astronomy. Yeah. But then also so you got that, but then it would be combining with Jewish observance of the Sabbath, the traditional practice of having a day of rest every seven days, in accordance with the creation narrative in Genesis h during which during which it said in Genesis that God created the heavens and the earth over the course of six days,

and then he rested on the seventh. Though, you know, when I was thinking about this, it actually raised an interesting history of religions question, which is, I don't know if there's any any evidence which which actually came first the sixth day creation narrative or the practice of having a day of rest. That's a great question. I was reading about it in the background of some distinctive values

in the Hebrew Bible by Cyrus H. Gordon Uh. He wrote that there were there were two different explanations of the Sabbath. In Exodus, it was the seventh day of rest after the six days of creation, as we've already mentioned. But in the Book of Deuteronomy quote the Sabbath is said to commemorate the exodus from Egypt. Israel must never forget that God saved them from slavery, and therefore these reel lites must always provide a day of rest for

the entire community, slaves included. Oh, that's interesting. So those are but those are both passages about the institution of the Sabbath day because those are in the Laws of Moses, right, So like the one in Exodus would be during the Decalogue, during the Ten Commandments that says you should honor the

Sabbath day and keep it holy um. And And that's an interesting reminder that the narrative in Genesis about the creation of the world actually doesn't lay out a a practice, you know, it's just the story on which it is later invoked to say that you should keep the Sabbath day right. He also mentions that the background of the Biblical Sabbath is the samaro Acadian system of lucky and unlucky days. So there are days when it is advised

to work and others where it is not. And this is something we'll see in the future when we look at other calendar systems as well, the idea that there's a certain amount of divination in a calendar system. It's about it. Sometimes, it's in fact, it's sometimes specifically about knowing what days are appropriate for beginning various ventures and

so forth. Okay, but so whether you are going with h with the the Jewish example or with the the possibly related ancient Mesopotamian example, uh, this would have something like a week that has that has days within it that are set aside for some kind of religious reason. Yeah. Gordon, however, drives home the quote rituals are primary and the historical

or mythological explanations come later. Furthermore, he says that the significance of the Sabbath tradition doesn't depend on what informed it, but rather on how it is reflected upon, and then mythological than than you know, crafted into mythology um, which I think is an important thing to keep in mind that like, not everything is just this perfect linear system. It's like, well, we established this, and this is the

connection it has to our religion or our mythology. Sometimes, you know, and very often we're taking things that are that have been absorbed in and are practiced and then we're creating the reasons for it. And yeah, totally, and a lot of this is a common opinion. I've encountered a loon among a lot of scholars of religion and cultural anthropologists. The idea that when there is a myth or story that corresponds to a ritual and says this is why we do the ritual, it's often believed that actually,

probably the ritual was done before the myth was there. Yeah, of course, we you know, we can't know that in every case because a lot of times there's just no way to decide for sure one way or another. But yeah,

it does seem like that happens a lot. But on the other hand, I mean, if you're imagining what kinds of origin something like a week could have, and again here we would be talking about a week in the broader sense, not necessarily like ours stem of of seven days, um, but like a blocks of days of you know, some manageable length that subdivide the month. Um. You could imagine totally different even totally practical or economic considerations that could

lead to the creation of things like that. Yeah, And in and in this we come to the idea of the market week, um, which which I realized is also I think the name of various um like media shows about like the economies and so forth, which is which is kind of funny when you when you when you look at this basic idea of the market week. So um. I'm gonna cite several different authors here, but one of the first places I turned to is I I turned to Brian and Fagan, who has written a lot about

about ancient history and about ancient technologies. And I was reading a chapter that he wrote in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World, a book there for back to a lot, and this is a chapter that he wrote with the author Anthony f Any, author of Empires

of Time, Clocks, Calendars and Culture. And in that they state that the period of the week be at a seven day week or an eight day week or even a ten day week is quote a good measure of the time it takes to harvest a manageable load of fruits and vegetables, take them to market, dispense them before they overripen, and then return to the field for another round.

This is so interesting because I was wondering about I was like, could it possibly be that that any origins of a week or week like institution could be related to the freshness of food? I mean, and that that would still be reflected in like how often people typically go grocery shopping. Yeah, and and there seems to be a very strong case to be made for this. I've

I've come across the several sources that explore this at length. Um. Now, Fagan and A any right that this market week was likely shifted down to seven days, probably from like eight days uh or more during the first millennium BC E

in the Sumerian world, in order to quote accommodate heavily connections. Um. So we can imagine what that would be again just very loosely speaking, uh, you know, thinking of astronomical significance of the number seven, and if you already have a market week that is eight days then you know, maybe you just ratcheted down to seven. And also they write

that seven uh, seven does have have a few different connections. Uh. You know, there's the number of visible planets, plus the sun and moon as we discussed, also roughly the interval between quarter phases of the moon. But Venie writes in Empires of Time that the eight day work week was

ultimately uh quote of unknown origin. Uh, though still sites the market week idea though I've I've also seen the eight day work week cited as an etruscan um invention of perhaps the seventh and eighth centuries b c. According to Aviatar Zaruberville in the seven Day Circle, Uh, the evolution of the week generally coincides with the rise of market economies, so weekly market cycles ended up emerging in

human activity. Um. Again, this is you know, the time it takes to to have fruits and vegetables come in from the field, make it to market, and then you get back to the fields again. But they didn't have to be seven days long, obviously, um. Zaruberville points to three day market weeks in ancient Meso America in Indo China, a ten day market week in ancient Peru, and of course there's also this twelve day market week in ancient

southern China. And he says that this, UM, this Chinese twelve day week is a quote classic example of a weekly cycle that served to regulate economic transactions. And uh, I was reading about this in the seven day circle, and if I'm gonna understand doing it correctly, this encompassed multiple three day market cycles and six day market cycles

as well. UM. And that's something you see with several of these examples of different week systems before, certainly before the seven day week that we think of now was fully adopted, you would often have different week cycles or what you might categorize as a week uh, coexisting with each other. Um And and you still see that to a certain extent in parts of the world, as we'll

discuss now. Zeruberville writes that during the eighth or seventh centuries b c e. The eight day market evolved in what is now Italy and and a Truscan quote time reckoning system based on the number eight, and it revolved around a periodic market day that was held regularly every eight days. And of course this Etruscan system is going to be key because it coincides with and feeds into

the Roman system, which we've already alluded to. So in our next episode of the podcast, we'll jump back in with the Etruscan system and the Roman use of the of the Etruscan system, and and continue to build up from there. There's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. I mean, even just the uh, like the market week stuff I found particularly um uh fascinating. Yeah, and I've got a great paper that we can get into about the Roman origins of the of the seven day week

that we used today. But we can also talk about some really cool cultural variations of different kinds of weeks and about some of the psychological effects of weeks. Yeah. Absolutely, Uh So this is your brain on Friday's. So this episode is a Thursday episode, and we're going to be back with a Tuesday episode. Um yeah, I remember there was a time, speaking of days, where we used to think it was it was just completely inappropriate to have a part one on a Thursday and a part two

on the following Tuesday. And I don't know, maybe maybe some listeners think it's inappropriate still, uh, but generally listeners have informed us that they don't care. So but going back to that sort of linear system and linear thinking regarding the week. It was kind of like, no, things must begin and end within the same week. Otherwise, like what it's like, you're just cutting it in half. We have like one uh, disembodied slab of episode on one side of the week, and it is just like the

and the Magician's Blade falls on Sunday evening. But obviously that's not the case. So so yeah, well we'll be back in the next episode. But we would love to hear from everyone out there, because I know everyone. Everyone

has thoughts on the days of the week. Uh, you know, days that are good, days that are bad, and days that that have their own particular energy about them, the things that define these days for us, and uh and yeah, also the occasional experience of maybe forgetting what day it is, or feeling like the day you were in is surely not a Friday. Surely this is a Thursday because it feels like a Thursday. So join us next time. In the meantime, well, here's how how we divide up the week.

Usually on Monday's we do listener mail. On Tuesday's core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Wednesday art of Factor, Monster Fact Thursday, another core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Friday Weird House Cinema. That's that's the day that we're in love with a strange film. And then Saturday, well that is a day where we bust out a Vault episode which is a rerun. And then on Sunday, well, then that is the day we rest huge. Thanks as

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows. They starts four starts fourt