semiopen

I agree with your dating, more or less.

The fundamentalist (Haredi) dating to Abraham though is important.

My suggestion is that the seven day week probably was earlier than the creation story and based on the visible planets.

BTW, I don't find the relationship of the week to a moon cycle convincing because that is actually a little over 29 days... The Egyptian 10 day week is not obviously inferior to 7.

Analyst

Yeah but how do you split up 29 and a bit days?

Personally I like 3 10-day weeks per month each with a 3 day weekend but let's face it, it isn't going to happen. (The 5/6 days left over could be a special year end vacation / celebration - thus the calendar never changes!)

Casper

It is realy pretty eloquent if you focus instead on tracking the sidereal month and not the synodic month.

Instead of counting days, which is of little importance in a lunar calender, you were to count celestial events like sunrise, high noon and sunset, the significance of three and division in thirds seems fairly obvious, to me at least; I wouldn't be surprised if higher math evolved in expanding the cycles to reduce error over time more than anything else.

Take a stone and place it in a bucket for every event (sunrise, high noon and sunset).

After you have placed 82 of these stones in a bucket you know that the moon is back in the exact same place relative to the stars. One siderial month.

But not quite exactly, though almost unobservable to all but the court experts. So you add a new ritual; each time you fill a bucket you leave it there and start on another bucket. Once you have filled 30 buckets, you are one event off overall, so you use the next celestial event not to add a rock but to empty all the buckets. Now the moon really is exactly where it should be after 30 sidereal months have passed.

Or is it? As the court grows and knowledge flourishes, records are reviewed and experience is gained, some bright individual notices that there is still a slight variation, and a new ritual must be added; every time you have performed the ritualistic emptying of the 30 cups, you need to put those 30 cups in a box and start on a new set. And whenever you have 30 boxes of cups, you use the next celestial event to empty the boxes. 900 sidereal months, or over 67 solar years, and your moon positioning is exactly where it should be. I believe you can extend the ritual once more and achieve an extremely precise level of sidereal accuracy but after several hundred years the constellations will have changed to some degree and who really cares; Y2K is a long ways off and the court has a really nice retirement plan...

I'm still working out the synodic month, but it seems pretty straightforward by counting only sunrise and sunset as "rock and bucket" events, using 59 rocks per bucket, and changing the emptying ritual to employ only 15 cups (ah, that natural 3 again), and instead of just emptying them you empty them and place the first rock in the first bucket. The box ritual would still be followed as above only it would contain 60 buckets (yep, there's that 60).

I may be way off on my math somewhere, and I don't want to hypothesize from the armchair too much except to say that with primitive tools for observation and recording this "could" work in the hindsight of current modern knowledge. And I think some sort of cyclical patterning probably offered the opportunity for development of these systems.

Of course I know my big hole is counting 82 and 59 in the first place, but it is one of those things I really enjoyed thinking about.

Clivedurdle

Newgrange clearly was built with very good understanding of this stuff, stonehenge probably as well.

Programme I cauught on BBC TV 4 about Islamic scientists and Copernicus did not mention that these "Islamic" scientists (who kept on using the word "doubt" in their work), were from Babylon!

Casper

There has always been some speculation that the aubrey holes might be used in some way to achieve this. For instance, if a post was moved over by one hole every morning and every evening and rocks moved in the opposite direction each day at noon with special event status resting on solstices or something like that. I remember a book about it being a giant supercomputer but I think it stated there were 57 holes, not 56, don't quite remember.

Heck, the Mayans had a pretty accurate system too, and they used a modified base 7 scheme. Had to allow for more than one calender too. I guess the real question is did these math skills arise out of commercial use or out of astrological use? Even today, in Mexico at least, humans rely on a binary division of segments and not decimal. They may sell beans in kilos, but they still designate half kilos, quarter kilos, etc in the market. That sort of commercial opportunity just loves binary weights like the US still uses; pounds are divided by halves, quarters and eigths, and if you get to a point where you need smaller divisions you go with ounces. If you get down to a 16th of an ounce you are in drams, and if you go much smaller than that you are beyond the average everyday commercial stage of weighing. Why bother with neat and clean decimals if you aren't performing precise calculations? And if you do, what difference does it make if you use grams or grains, except that SI attempts to set a standard yardstick for consistency with natural phenomenon?

Clivedurdle

It is as if religious ideas force paradoxes - the gods say it is x, observation says y, and the contradiction forces further thought to attempt to resolve it.

An unconscious Hegellian process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Grit in the oyster leading to pearls.

Casper

You may have something there. If "higher knowledge" were clear and logical what need would there be for theology?

Anat

Thanks for the link, Clivedurdle. This is one of those things that I used to 'know' without having a source. Notice how at some point the Jews took something that was intended as the avoidance of ill-fortune and made it into something to celebrate. And then turned it into something to use as an excuse to be violent to the unorthodox (see history of Jerusalem Shabbat wars).

Roger Pearse

Actually we reject it in the UK too. Our masters think differently, however, and have been cramming it down our throats. Not that any of us have any idea what a kilogram is anyway.

Analyst

All part of the wonderful 'Europeanization' of the UK? How do you like being run by the French?