Did the Romans have a 7-day week? If so, why? And what were the names they gave to the days of the week?
Short answer - no. A quick search of some online Latin dictionaries doesn’t even turn up a Latin term for “week”. (Which surprises me a little, I’d have thought one would be, um, retro-fitted sometime in the Mediaeval period).
You’ll know, of course, that our English day-names are derived from Germanic roots, even Norse/Germanic mythology (e.g. Wednesday = Woden’s Day, after Woden/Wotan/Odin).
The Romans used a different method (trying to remember my school Latin classes here, it’s been a while). They had the twelve months we know so well (and the names of those are derived from the original Latin), and they referred to dates by referencing three marked days within each month. The first day of the month was the Kalends, the fifth or seventh day was the Nones, the thirteenth or fifteenth day was the Ides. (There was a recent thread on the Ides of March, have a look for that). The Nones and Ides varied (consistently0 according to month - little mnemonic rhyme I was given:-
“March, July, October, May,
The Ides are on the fifteenth day.”
Any other month, they’re the thirteenth. And later Ides = later Nones, so, if March 15th is the Ides, March 7th is the Nones.
My memory gets hazier from here on in, but IIRC, dates are given in terms of the number of days to the next milestone, including the day itself. So, today (March 27th) is… urr… VI Kal. Apr., or 6 days before the Kalends of April, including the Kalends themselves (i.e. April 1st) as one of those days. April 1st will be Kal. Apr.; April 2nd will be IV Non. Apr - four days before the Nones (which are on the 5th, remember?) My memory may not be what it was, so take all of this with a grain or two of salt…
So… it looks to me like the division of the lunar month into four equal-size portions, each with seven named days, began with the Dark Age Germans and/or Scandinavians. And I, for one, am heartily grateful to them…
Many thanks. I would assume, however, that the ancient Hebrews had a 7-day week, since they were required to celebrate a sabbath every 7 days. But apparently the “week” concept was not universal; and somehow the Hebrew week got Norse names applied to the days, bypassing the Romans entirely. (And of course Revolutionary France tried to abandon the 7-day-week, but that’s another story). Fun stuff.
More than you probably wanted to know:
No.
Understand that I’m talking here about the RomanRepublican calendar, in use from at least the end of the 5[sup]th[/sup] century BCE (possibly earlier, but the records are lost), until C. Julius Caesar’s calendar reforms (the “Julian” calendar) in 46 BCE. The Republican calendar, incidentally, (which is said to have evolved from earlier monarchical calendars now undocumented), deserves some kind of award for being the most hopelessly confusing plan by people have ever tried to keep track of time.
The closest thing to a week that the Romans used was the period between the kalends, or first day of the month (so called from calare, to proclaim, because originally it occur when the pontifex maximus, or high priest, proclaimed that he had seen the new moon) and the nones, which fell on the 7[sup]th[/sup] day of the month, except when it fell on the 5[sup]th[/sup], and I’m not sure if it was celebrated in the intercalary month of Mercedinus, which occurred after February 23[sup]rd[/sup] in years when the pontifices said it should, at all…(you see what I mean about the Roman calendar being confusing).
Problems:
1/ Simulpost
2/ Must review before submitting- what are the ‘des of March’?
Judaic calendar- even more than you wanted:
http://www.ortelius.de/kalender/j_uk.html
and before you ask for Persian, Christian etc.:
http://www.ortelius.de/kalender/idx_en.html
a long list of historic calendars.
The Babylonians may have begun the 7-day week concept around 700 BC, when they assigned their planet-gods to the different days of the week. The idea was borrowed by Constantine, who replaced the names with those of Roman planet-gods. The idea of a week didn’t make it to Britain until the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests, who took up some old Roman customs but kept their own religion and gods, hence the change to the Norse gods. There’s a chart of the different gods in my post in this thread.
There are Latin names for the days of the week, but I don’t know when they came into common use. They are named after the planets (for astrological reason). The planets are in turn were named after the gods.
English Latin named for
Sunday Solis dies the sun
Monday Lunae dies the moon
Tuesday Martis dies Mars
Wednesday Mercurii dies Mercury
Thursday Jovis dies Jupiter
Friday Veneris dies Venus
Saturday Saturni dies Saturn
See an earlier thread in Comments on Cecil’s columns: Names of the weekdays The Latin word for “week” is hebdomada, but I don’t think it came into common use until the Christian era.
The Roman calendar did have the “nundiae”, the “nine-days,” used to coordinate market days and civil holidays, a cycle of 8 days that appeared on calendars as simply days labeled A through H.
Romans used “inclusive reckoning”, where the last day of a period also is considered as the beginning of the new period. It is confusing, and was even for them-- for example, the original Julian rule of one leap year in four years was interpreted to be what we would call every third year. This persisted until 745 A.U.C., when Augustus had to reform the calendar again, and as a reward, the Senate named a month in his honor. (His birth month, September, had only 30 days, and was considered an “unlucky” month. He prefered Sextilis, a 31 day “lucky” month, because that was the month of his victory at Actium.)
Did a bit more digging… I can’t believe I forgot about the Jewish Sabbath. Put it down to advancing senility.
The seven day week was made “official” in 321 AD, by the Emperor Constantine. At a guess, this relates to the Christianization of the Empire at this time; the Christians wanted a holy day once a week, and the existing astrologically-based week was the handiest way to handle this. (Even if the days were named after pagan gods.)
Hebdomas is in-period Latin for “week”; it’s also Greek, and I suspect it’s originally a Greek word. The Greeks had the seven-day names-of-the-planets week as early as 334 BC; the Romans preumably had the concept, but just didn’t use it (commonly) until Constantine. Their dating system does seem to be very much theirs alone… for example, there’s the comment attributed to Augustus about “I’ll see it gets done on the Greek Kalends”, meaning “never”, as the Greeks didn’t use Kalends…