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Calendars by week number5/7/2023 ![]() ![]() In that international standard, the "first week of the year" is that week which includes the first Thursday of the year. In practice, this means that calendar formats disagree, and that "next week" said on Sunday means "the week beginning tomorrow". ![]() The ISO week date, part of the international standard ISO 8601, also defines Monday as the first day of the week. Because of the two-day weekend, some modern calendars end the week on Sunday and begin it on Monday. Following European colonization and the subsequent rise of global corporate business, the seven-day week has become universal in keeping time, even in cultures that did not practise it before. The seven-day week soon became a practice among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Later, after the establishment of Islam, Friday became that religion's day of observance. The Jews of the 4th century retained their tradition of Saturday observance, by then 800 to 1700 years old, and continue to do so. the Roman Emperor Constantine regulated the use of the week due to a problem of the myriad uses of various days for religious observance, and established Sunday as the day for religious observance and rest for all groups, not just those Christians and others who were already observing Sunday. Contemporaneously, Christians, following the biblical instruction, spread the week's use along with their religion.Īs the early Christians evolved from being Jewish to being a distinct group, various groups evolved from celebrating both the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and the first day or the Lord's Day (Sunday), to celebrating only Sunday. Various groups of citizens of the Roman Empire adopted the week, especially those who had spent time in the eastern parts of the empire, such as Egypt], where the 7-day week was in use. The only difference is that the planets in the Japanese week have Chinese names based on the five elements rather than pagan deities. By contrast, the Japanese names refer to the Chinese Sun, Moon and the five planets. Thus the 19th century Japanese, when adopting the seven day western week, took their own astrological week with names for the days of the week that corresponded to the English names (and in fact were better preservations of the original Babylonian concepts, the English day names having been conflated with gods from Germanic mythology). It is mostly kept in astrological purposes and cited in several Buddhist texts until the Jesuits reintroduced the concept in the 16th century. The days were assigned to each of the luminaries, but the week did not affect social life or the official calendar. The Chinese use of the seven day week (and thus Korean, Japanese, Tibetan, and Vietnamese use) traces back to the 600's AD, when the concept of the seven "luminaries" of Babylonia spread to China. The Hebrew (and later Christian) seven-day week corresponds to the biblical creation story, in which God created the universe in six days, then rested on the seventh. ![]() Other theories speculate that the fixed seven-day period appeared due to evenly dividing a lunar month into quarters.Days and deities were based on the seven heavenly bodies or "luminaries" visible to the naked eye (the Sun, Moon, and 5 visible planets). The ancient Babylonians observed a seven-day week, stemming from astronomical observation and association.Hindu civilization employed a seven-day week, mentioned in the Ramayana, a sacred epic written in Sanskrit about 500 BC, as Bhanu-vaar meaning Sunday, Soma-vaar meaning Moon-day and so forth.Hindu, Babylonian, and Jewish seven-day week The seven-day week became established in both the West and East according to different paths: Being based on a count kept by people rather on the relative motion of the moon and stars, the week was not "heavenly," but in the traditional seven-day week, this was overcome by assigning the sun, moon, and the five planets known to the ancients (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) each to a specific day of the week. The week (meaning a fixed count of days) was much simpler and more precise way of doing this when compared with a lunar calendar-based system or a system based on the seasonal rotation of the celestial sphere. In sparsely populated areas where trade is not conducted every day it is essential that farmers and consumers agree in advance on what day they will meet, especially if the walk to market takes several hours or days. They also observe that the name for "week" is often the same as that for "market day", suggesting the concept of a week is likely to arise in any agrarian or pre-agrarian society where people have marketplaces or market days. ![]()
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