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Twice half its length 08 August 2013 20:42 Someone asked me recently "why are there seven days in a week?" Good question, well asked. By coincidence, a couple of days later I picked up a book ("How Long is a Piece of String" by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham, lest anyone accuse me of plagiarism) which not only addressed this question, but also explained where the names came from and why the days are in the order they are (e.g. who decided that Tuesday should come after Monday and before Wednesday). Ok let's deal within the seven days thing first. It seems most likely that it is to do with the phases of the moon, which are about seven days long. There is also the seven days of creation in Genesis, but no one knows whether this was written before or after it was decided to have seven days in a week. Names of days and their order are slightly more interesting. To paraphrase slightly, about the same time that they created a week of seven days they realised that there were seven large celestial objects wandering about the skies. They called them planets, though we now know that not all of them were so. "They" are the ancient Babylonians btw. These objects were: the sun, the moon, saturn, mercury, jupiter, mars, and venus. The obvious solution would be to name each day of the week after each of these objects, which they did - but not directly. First they sorted these objects in order of the length of their year. This gave: Saturn (29 years); Jupiter (12 years); Mars (687 days); Sun (365 days); Venus (225 days); Mercury (88 days); Moon (28 days). They then named each hour of the day in order after these objects: so the first hour was Saturn, the next Jupiter, then Mars and so on. After the seventh hour they started again, and when they reached the end of the day they started the next day with the next hour. This meant that the first hour of each day was named after a different planet (write them all out if you want to - I can't be bothered) and so each day became named after its first hour: "OK", I can hear you cry. "I can see the connection between Saturn's Day, Sun's Day, Moon's Day and Saturday, Sunday, Monday but the rest of them have no relationship" Yes, you're right. That's because the Anglo-Saxons and/or Vikings invaded Britain and made us change the rest of the names to what they used. However, have a look at the French names and the connection is clearer. Saturn's Day / Saturday / Samedi The title of this post, btw, is the answer to "how long's a piece of string". Which, of course, means that every piece of string is the same length, since every piece of string is twice half its length.
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