Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/349

Rh seven planets, they should invent a seven-day measurement of time. In the Chaldean astronomy the planets were arranged in order of magnitude of orbit—that is to say, as follows: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun (i. e., the Earth), Venus, Mercury, and the Moon; and if the fact of the planets being seven in number led to the invention of a seven-day period, it is reasonable to suppose that each day would have been named in succession after a planet, and that the order of days would have been as above instead of what it is—viz., Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. This order was altogether unintelligible until some clay tablets of the period of Sargon I, about 3800 which explained it, were exhumed in Chaldea. From these it was learned that each hour of the day of twenty-four hours was consecrated to a planet in the order of magnitude of orbit—viz., Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, etc.—and the day itself received the name of the planet to which the first hour was sacred. Thus, if the first hour of a day were dedicated to Saturn, the eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-second hours would also fall to that planet, the twenty-third to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the twenty-fifth—that is, the first hour of the next day—to the Sun. In like manner the first hour of the third day would fall to the Moon, that of the fourth to Mars, that of the fifth to Mercury, that of the sixth to Jupiter, and that of the seventh to Venus. This is the explanation of the order of the days of the week, and it appears to be the result of a new idea being grafted on to an old institution—viz., the seven-day week. Before the Chaldeans could consecrate hours to planets, they must have divided their day into hours, and, if they could do this, why could not they perform the much simpler operation of subdividing the lunar month and inventing the week?

The names, in the Chaldean order, appear to have been introduced into Egypt with the Ptolemaic hypothesis ( 150), and the Romans borrowed them from the Egyptians. Before, however, the Chaldean order was introduced into Egypt, the Egyptians had a seven-day period, and the sixth-seventh day was then sacred to the moon, instead of the third, as under the Chaldean system. In a hymn to Amen-Ra, found in a hieratic papyrus of the fourteenth century and purporting to be a copy of an earlier document, occurs the following: