Days of the week, historically and globally

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This is a very basic question, and perhaps a na?ve one, but I?m sure others than myself have thought about it: given that the seven-day planetary week has been around for a fairly long time, and spread to parts of the world that were largely isolated from each other for most of that time, did all the various regional calendars really agree on what day of the week it was? Would, say, a Thursday in 10th-century Europe necessarily have been considered a Thursday in India as well, at that time (disregarding the differences in local time, naturally)? If so, how was such a remarkable unanimity upheld, considering that there are no observable phenomena to correlate with the days of the week ? in other words, that they are entirely a product of culture rather than nature?
https://astrology.martingansten.com/

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I seriously doubt it Martin (at least not all calendars). Calendar history has issues similar to time change history (time zones), but much less severe. Pope Gregory skipped about 11 days in October 1582 to fix problems with the Julian calendar but I think the days of the week were preserved in sequence. October 5th, 1582 didn't exist and became October 15th, 1582 if memory serves correctly and went from Thursday Oct 4, 1582 to Friday Oct 15, 1582. After the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, some places such as England didn't accept the new standard until the 1700's. I remember reading that there were reports of riots because workers missed a weekend and were forced to work several more days without a break, but I can't confirm this.

http://www.adsb.co.uk/date_and_time/cal ... form_1752/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

During Lilly's day there was apparently a system of dual dating in place and they might have preserved that order.

This is a common problem encountered when working with Julan dates and synchronizing the real number values with the calendar representations.

Valens says to watch for the heliacal rising of Sirius and on that day (of the week) that it arises, that is the mundane lord of the year, then the lord of the month was apparently from the first day of the month, then the lord of the day and hours are done in the same manner.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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Not sure about India, but I believe there was uniformity across Europe and the Near East from the time of the Roman Empire, at least in terms of the civil calendar (possibly this was the case from the time of Alexander too, who would surely have wanted to enforce a common civil calendar upon all the territories he captured).

Valens appears to be the oldest source we have to clearly show that planetary days were allocated in an unbroken sequence according to the calendric day of the week - so his planetary days didn't depend on determining the beginning of the month from the Moon, or the rising of certain stars, etc. In book I he gives instructions on how to work out the day of the week mathematically for dates going back to the beginning of the era of Augustus (Thoth 1, 30 BC), which was a Sunday - hence the planetary week begins with the Sun's day. Valens charts are very interesting for the way that, if you test the chart examples he offers with dates, they show the planetary day to be correct according to the instruction he gives, and according to the calculations of modern computer software. Since subsequent calendar reforms only affected dates and not the days of the week, it seems there has been an unbroken tradition for astrologers that goes back to Valens (possibly earlier) - though, as I said, I have no idea of the situation in places like India or China.

Curtis, the dual dating you mention in Lilly's time, was his dual reference to the astronomical and civil calendar. I have noticed in the past that Lilly's charts give really good correspondence with what software calculates for planetary days, but charts of other 17th century astrologers, such as Simon Foreman don't match up so nicely.

Re: Days of the week, historically and globally

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According to this author:
http://www.academia.edu/9242908/Ancient ... plishments

There were no weekdays or astrological signs used on Old Mahabharata text and were later interpolations.

For what it is worth: Sewell and Dixit, writing on Indian Calendar say this:

https://archive.org/download/indiancalendarwi00seweuoft

{Changed image to a link }

http://i63.tinypic.com/nqebl4.jpg

PD
Last edited by pankajdubey on Tue Jan 26, 2016 3:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Deb wrote:Valens appears to be the oldest source we have to clearly show that planetary days were allocated in an unbroken sequence according to the calendric day of the week - so his planetary days didn't depend on determining the beginning of the month from the Moon, or the rising of certain stars, etc.
I agree that most of the calendars of the west appear to have preserved the order of days.

This is what Valens says (book I, pg 36, Schmidt translation):
Generally, then, the ancients took the ruler of the year and of the cosmic motions from the first of Thoth (for that is where they made the beginning of the year), more naturally from the arising of Sirius.
I remember reading about some calendar chaos in England around the year 1643.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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I believe that Valens also talks about the "planet going about and the one executing" in one of Schmidt's later translations (book V?). I seem to remember Valens laying out the 4 rulers (Year, Month, Day, Hour) and then comparing it to nativities (most notably rulers like the king of Egypt) to see how the year would unfold for the country. I remember that he didn't give any examples, just a short statement that it should be done hinting that this is another eminence consideration.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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Thanks for all comments so far. For what it's worth, my experience of Indian calendar data so far has been that the weekdays normally do agree with modern recalculation. What prompted my question was a problem with one specific date (for the completion of an astrological work). The author gives five or six variables, all of which converge on one particular date by recalculation -- except the day of the week, which is two days off! It seems an odd mistake to make, but there just isn't another date that fits all the other criteria.
https://astrology.martingansten.com/

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zoidsoft wrote:
Deb wrote:Valens appears to be the oldest source we have to clearly show that planetary days were allocated in an unbroken sequence according to the calendric day of the week - so his planetary days didn't depend on determining the beginning of the month from the Moon, or the rising of certain stars, etc.
I agree that most of the calendars of the west appear to have preserved the order of days.

This is what Valens says (book I, pg 36, Schmidt translation):
Generally, then, the ancients took the ruler of the year and of the cosmic motions from the first of Thoth (for that is where they made the beginning of the year), more naturally from the arising of Sirius.
Hi Curtis, re your emboldened remark - here Valens is talking about determining the ruler of the year and making reference to a variance of technique amongst ancient authors. My comment was in regard to his determination of the planetary rulership of days of the week - for this he gives very clear instruction, with a worked out example at 1.9. Days are counted from the date attributed to the start of the Alexandrian era (Thoth I, 30 BC). By knowing this day was a Sunday, the planetary day of any chart was calculated by knowing how many days it was from the start of the era, adding allowance for leap-years, then dividing the total by 7. Then the planetary hours are calculated in the usual manner, with the planetary day ruler being the ruler of the first hour of that day. I'm not in my office to give the Schmidt ref, but the passage is at the bottom of p.11 and top of p.12 in the Riley translation:

www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Vettius%20 ... entire.pdf

There's an interesting paper on Valens' calendar use: "Vettius Valens and the Planetary Week" by Robert L. Odom. Very informative, but I recommend it a little hesitantly because I don't agree with all of Odom's assessment of Valens' techniques.

http://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/auss/vol3/iss1/10/

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Deb wrote:Hi Curtis, re your emboldened remark - here Valens is talking about determining the ruler of the year and making reference to a variance of technique amongst ancient authors. My comment was in regard to his determination of the planetary rulership of days of the week - for this he gives very clear instruction, with a worked out example at 1.9. Days are counted from the date attributed to the start of the Alexandrian era (Thoth I, 30 BC). By knowing this day was a Sunday, the planetary day of any chart was calculated by knowing how many days it was from the start of the era, adding allowance for leap-years, then dividing the total by 7. Then the planetary hours are calculated in the usual manner, with the planetary day ruler being the ruler of the first hour of that day...
Clearly Valens see's the heliacal phenomena of Sirius as important or he wouldn't have said "more naturally the arising of Sirius" at the end of the section for calculating the ruler of the year, month, day and hour at 1.10. You were saying that fixed stars didn't figure into it which is why I put it in bold.
Deb wrote:so his planetary days didn't depend on determining the beginning of the month from the Moon, or the rising of certain stars, etc.
I'm sure you know the hours aren't calculated independently from the order of the day rulers so calculations must extrapolate to the lord of the year. The beginning of the year was set for the time of the flooding of the Nile in Egypt which they associated with the heliacal rising of Sirius.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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I understand you think my earlier comment was questionable, but it was correct, and made an important point. You are reading the comment about the rising of Sirius out of context - this was not determining Thoth I (New Years day) at the time of Valens; the the gist of the remark is like me saying that New Years day is January 1st but the natural beginning of the year is the winter solstice.

I've already explained and given links to show that Valens gives instructions on how to calculate the planetary days and hours - he demonstrates them step-by-step with a chart example so I'm not sure what extra details I could add here to make his instruction clearer. The paper I mentioned, and provided a link for, is well worth reading - it examines Valens use of the days of the week in detail and explains why Valens used the Alexandrian calendar set for the era of Augustus (recognised by the Roman Empire), not the old Egyptian calendar.

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FYI?Chinese astrology also incorporated the planetary dating into their system after some cultural exchange with India at Tong Dynasty (maybe between 800-1000AD) Most knowledge were exchanged by books only because of long distance travel. Some astrological knowledge may be passed along from Perssia too but it was not well documented. Chinese had the planetary dating as a specialized subpart in selection theory for FengShui. There was no weekly holiday and no reference to weekday for common people in Ancient time. The concepts of weekday were not properly introduced until Britain in 18/19 Century.

The well documented story in the history was that the planetary dating passed from India to China, and to Japan shortly after. Japan imperial court had a special department delicated to various Chinese Metaphysic subjects. One of the duty was to keep track of planetary dating counting . Then Japan entered isolation from China for whatever reason for an extended period of time. They were totally on their own keeping track of planetary date counting with no corresponding with any outside source s for hundreds of years.

When Holand sent ships sailing East and reached Japan for tohe first time, Japanese found out the foreigner used a weekday system based on planets (it is more obvious in other Latin base language, English is a odd ball and not exactly easy to tell). They rushed to the Imperial court to check against the planetary dating system from Chinese Metaphysic and found exact matching for both systems. It was a very big deal and well documented in Japanese History. I do not keep a reference for this story. I believe any Japanese source can easily confirm this.

China had some more few and infrequent knowledge exchange with Arabic culture and Roman Empire during this time. The isolation nature of island nation made the Japanese discovery more dramatic.