20210826 : Days of the week
I In recent days, I have heard a lot of TGIFs, many thank god its Sunday, and some even TGIMs. I know we hate Sundays in our house as our nanny/ housekeeper doesn't come and we have to do everything ourselves. Which got me thinking, why do we have the weekly holidays on Sat and Sun and not other days. Is it because of the bad influence of Saturn maybe? Then I got to thinking what is a week anyway? Doesn't coincide with any astronomical cyclic event. Like a day, a month (true month, 28 days, corresponding to the moon's cycle. Not the arbitrary calendar we follow - that's a different story), or the year (365 days to go around). Nothing for the week. Turns out we owe it to the Babylonians (modern day Iraq). They were very good observers of the cosmos in general (stars and planets). They obsessed with 7 of them (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus ans Saturn). So, when they wanted to segment the month further for better tracking, the choice was straight forward. 7 days