Repetition of a post after four year (OMG!!! dint know that I am blogging since then) from my blog
There are a lot of things in life we take for granted and hardly think about its origin or reason. We rarely think that at some stage of history obvious looking things were a point of research or debate. Sequence of days in a week is one such thing about which I never thought. Why it should be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on? Why not any other sequence? Few days back I was reading a book about Indian astronomy and found the answer.
There are five visible planets in the sky - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and in older days Sun and Moon were also categorised as planets. So there were total 7 visible planets. (Navgrah concept in Indian astrology includes Rahu and Ketu, which are not physical objects but imaginary points, intersection points of Moon's orbit with the plane of Earth's revolution around Sun.)
Now arrange all the 7 planets in decreasing order of period (time taken to make a complete circle with reference to stars as seen from the earth)- Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon.
Each day has 24 hours. Assume that each hour has one ruler planet. Suppose that today's first hour ruler planet is Saturn, second hour ruler will be Jupiter, Third will be Mars, fourth will be Sun and so on. First hour ruler decides the day. Hence today is Saturday.
Repeating the above mentioned sequence we see that 22nd hour ruler is again Saturn, 23rd is Jupiter, 24th is Mars and 25th will be Sun. Now 25th hour is 1st hour of tomorrow, so it is Sunday tomorrow. Similarly tomorrow's 22nd hour is ruled by Sun, 23rd by Mercury, 24th by Venus and 25th by Moon. So day after tomorrow is Monday.
Wow.... its simply amazing to learn the way sequence of weekday has been setup.
Hmmm... interesting... sounded too contrived to me initially, the way you described it, but not after reading more about it... I think I got thrown off by your "Arrange the planets in decreasing order of period" and "Assume that each hour has one ruler planet" which seemed completely ad-hoc. I am sure I could generate other similar answers that led to SSMTWTF or MTWTFSS or WTFSSMT using different assumptions... After reading about it, I'm more convinced now, because it seems that the arrangement of planets and "the planets ruling every hour" were likely well established astrology/astronomy models much before they were combined to get weekdays... As I said, interesting!
ReplyDeleteoh, and, speaking of "interesting things that we take for granted and don't think about".. me and Garima were chatting just 1 or 2 days ago about why Roman alphabet is arranged the way it is.. it seems completely random, ABCDE...XYZ. They didn't even separate the vowels from consonants! as compared to the devnagri alphabet, where vowels and consonants are nicely separated and even among themselves are separated in different groups based on the way their sound is generate by mouth/tongue/lips.
ReplyDeleteABCD must also have some nice historical reason.. wikipedia should help.. abhi tak dekha naheen.. :P
wow....that's cool info.....I didn't know that...actually according to hindi names i used to think ki randomly koi toh order fix kiya hoga and they stick to it... :P
ReplyDeleteBut this is cool...read it up in wiki too :)
Ya.. interesting!
ReplyDeleteI think 7 day concept has western origin (may be Roman or Greek). I made up this opinion based on TV serials like Ramayana, Mahabharat, Chanakya. I know its not very sound base to term "week" concept as borrowed. but my observation in those serials is that they never used any weekday names (as far as I can remember). Fixing of any meeting/auspicious work/war always based on Hindu lunar calender like agle maas ki purnima, or chaitra shukla dashami etc etc. but never like agle mahine ke pahile mangalwar or pichale shukarwar ko.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason to think this is that hindi and english days named after same planet monday-somvar, sunday-ravivar. So there must be some cultural/commercial communication behind this linking, without which it is highly improbable to name weekday in the same order describing same planet name.
well, I have not checked it using google chacha. Can anyone help, if you have some research/thought in this regard?
yep.. european origin, which was then co-opted by indian people quite early.
ReplyDelete