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''Saturday'' and ''Sunday'' are commonly called the Weekend and are days of rest and Recreation in most western cultures. The other five days are then known as Weekday s. ''Friday'' and ''Saturday'' are days of rest in Muslim and Jewish countries respectively. The Biblical Sabbath lasts from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. However, the three Monotheist Religion s are in concordance to consider commonly Sunday as the first day of the week. ISO and European norms prescribe presently Monday. Origins of the week Various sources point to the seven day week originating in ancient Babylonia or Sumeria, with possible origins dating back to the Egyptians. It has been suggested that a seven day week might be much older, deriving from early human observation that there are five celestial objects which move in the night sky relative to the fixed stars (plus the Sun and the Moon). In any event, a seven day week based on heavenly luminaries eventually diffused both East and West, to the Romans via the Greeks, and to the Japanese via Manicheans, Indians and Chinese. The earliest known reference in Chinese writings is attributed to Fan Ning, who lived in the late 4th Century , while diffusions via India are documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yi Jing and the Ceylonese or Central Asian Buddhist monk Bu Kong of the 8th century. The Chinese transliteration of the planetary system was soon brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi; surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara Michinaga show the seven day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007. In Japan, the seven day system was kept in use (for astrological purposes) until its promotion to a full-fledged (Western-style) calendrical basis during the Meiji era. The seven day week is known to have been unbroken for almost two millennia via the Alexandrian , Julian , and Gregorian Calendar s. The date of Easter Sunday can be traced back through numerous Computistic Tables to an Ethiopic copy of an early Alexandrian table beginning with the Easter of 311 as described by Otto Neugebauer in ''Ethiopic astronomy and computus''. Only one Roman date with an associated day of the week exists from the first century and it agrees with the modern sequence, if properly interpreted (see below). Jewish dates with a day of the week do not occur this early. Order The week as we know it was introduced by astromancers around the , Jupiter , Mars , Sun , Venus , Mercury , Moon . (This order was first established by the Greek Stoics .) If the first hour of a day is dominated by Saturn (), then the second hour is dominated by Jupiter (), the third by Mars (), and so on, so that the sequence of planets repeats every seven hours. Therefore, the twenty-fifth hour, which is the first hour of the following day, is dominated by the Sun; the forty-ninth hour, which is the first hour of the next day, by the Moon. Thus, if a day is labelled by the planet which dominates its first hour, then Saturn's day is followed by the Sun's day, which is followed by the Moon's day, and so forth, as shown below. According to Vettius Valens, the first hour of the day began at sunset, which follows Greek and Babylonian convention. He also states that the light and dark halves of the day were presided over by the heavenly bodies of the first hour of each half. This is confirmed by a Pompeian graffito which calls 6 February 60 a Sunday. By modern reckoning, which reflects the ruler of the night, it was a Wednesday, but according to the system described by Valens the daylight hours were indeed controlled by the Sun. These two overlapping weeks continued to be used by Alexandria n Christians during the fourth century, but the days in both were simply numbered 1-7. Although names of gods were not used, the week beginning on Wednesday was named in Greek ''ton theon'' ( {Link without Title} of the gods), as used by the late fourth-century editor of the Easter letters of Bishop Athanasius , and in a table of Easter dates for 311–369 that survives in an Ethiopic copy. These overlapping weeks are still used in the Ethiopic Computus . Each of the days of the week beginning on Sunday is called a "Day of John" whereas each of the days of the week beginning on Wednesday is called a "tentyon", a simple transcription of the Greek ''ton theon''. The same order can be derived "geometrically" from an acute Heptagram , the {7/3} Star Polygon (as 24 Mod 7 = 3). The luminaries are arranged in the same Ptolemaic/Stoic order around the points of the heptagram. Tracing the unicursal line from one planet to the next gives the order of the weekdays. According to Aleister Crowley , in ''The Book of Thoth'' (1944), "It is believed that this neat discovery is due to the late G. H. Frater D.D.C.F." (Pt. 1, Ch. 1). (Although, as Crowley calls the figure a ''hex''agram, his reliability is somewhat suspect.) According to some sources this 'weekday heptagram is considerably older — It was with the adoption and widespread use of the seven-day week throughout the Hellenistic world of mixed cultures that this heptagram was created. First day of the week According to some interpretations of the Bible , God created the Earth in six days, and rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath , i.e. Saturday. This made Sunday the first day of the week, while Saturdays were reserved for celebration and rest. After the week was adopted in Early Christian Europe, Sunday remained the first day of the week, but also gradually displaced Saturday as the day of celebration and rest, being considered the Lord's Day . In some places Sunday thus came to be viewed as the last day of the week. The variation is evident from names of the days in some languages - in Church Latin, Portuguese, and Hebrew some days are simply called by their number starting from Sunday, e.g. Monday is called "second day" etc. In other languages, like Slavic Languages , days are also called after their ordinal numbers, but starting from Monday, making Tuesday the "second day". The increasing use of the two-day Weekend (Saturday and Sunday) in the 19th and 20th centuries helped propagate the use of Monday as the beginning of the week. Currently, the traditional Sunday-first system is used by some English speakers and much of Latin America , while most of continental Europe uses the Monday-first order. According to ISO 8601 , the international standard on representation of dates and times in data interchange, the week begins on a Monday. Names For personal names taken from the days of the week, see Akan Name s. In English all the days of the week are named after the ruling luminary, with most of the names coming from Anglo-Saxon gods and goddesses. Sunday and Monday are named directly from the sun and moon, although the Anglo-Saxon goddess Sunne is implicit in the name of the sun itself. Saturday is the only day named after a Roman God . Other Germanic languages generally follow the same pattern, but Dutch is the only other that preserves all the astronomical names. In most Romance Language s, such as Italian , Spanish and French , the names of the days ''except Saturday and Sunday'' come from Roman gods via the Latin. Welsh , the closest living language to that of Roman Britain , faithfully preserves all the Latin names, even though the language itself is not directly descended from Latin. In Japanese and Korean , Sunday and Monday are named after the Sun and Moon, while the other five days are translated using the names of the five classical planets, which themselves are named using the Five Elements of traditional Chinese philosophy. For example, Mercury is called "planet of water" in Japanese and Korean, and the day Wednesday (Mercury's day in the Romance languages) is called "day of water". In Chinese, days of the week are numbered except Sunday. Thus, the "first" day of the week starts on Monday. The early Christian Church was uncomfortable using names based on "false" Pagan gods, and introduced a simple numerical nomenclature which persists in many Europe an languages such as Portuguese , although in Slavic Languages the numbering starts on Monday rather than Sunday (anticipating ISO 8601 ). Arabic uses a similar system (with the same numbering as the western european languages), although in this case Friday (the Muslim day of prayer) is named while Sunday is numbered. In Chinese , all days except Sunday are numbered. Etymology Remnants of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse gods remain in the English language names for days of the week:
What is different is that the gods in question (except Saturn) do ''not'' appear to rule over the planets involved. Tables The (suggested) purpose of these tables is to show how far different languages preserve the associations with the ruling luminaries (or not!) and the Church's numbering of the days. (That is, not to list the names in "every" language: Wiktionary entries for the day names offer such lists – click on the links in the header row.) Astronomical
Numerical Notes #The Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, etc.) break from the pattern of using the Roman associations in preference for a Christian association: Sunday being the Christian day of rest, these days are named after the "day of our Lord". This is the norm in languages, such as Portuguese, where names faithfully follow Church usage. #The Romance languages, Old High German and German, and the Slavic languages have words for Saturday that are derived from the Hebrew Sabbath , via late Greek ''Sambaton''. German also has a second, Christianised name meaning "Eve of Sunday" (parallel to "Christmas Eve", for example). An alternative to the standard ''Samstag'' in northern dialects of German is ''Sonnabend'' ("Sun-evening"). #German and Finnish call Wednesday, prosaically, "mid-week"; Estonian ''kesknädal'' is equivalent, with "third day" (''kolmapäev'') also used; Icelandic uses "mid-week day"; Polish, Russian, etc. have "middle". #Old Norse, Swedish (and other North Germanic Language s), and Finnish and Estonian ( Finnic languages) call Saturday "washday" or "bathday", as it was the traditional day for washing and bathing. #Icelandic ''sunnudagur'' and ''mánudagur'' are astronomical, persisting presumably because there's no explicit reference to pagan gods. See also References
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