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WeekA week is a unit of time longer than a day and shorter than a month. In most modern calendars, including the Gregorian Calendar, the week is a period of seven days, making it the longest conventionally used time unit that contains a fixed number of days. Although having no direct astronomical basis, it is widely used as a unit of time. Weeks can be thought of as forming an independent continuous calendar running in parallel with various other calendars. However, some calendars have been designed so that a given date occurs on the same day of the week each year. This can be done by making the week dependent on the year, with some days each year that do not belong to any week: the proposed World Calendar has 52 weeks and 1 or 2 extra days each year, while the French Revolutionary Calendar had 36 weeks of 10 days and 5 or 6 extra days. The year can also be made dependent on the week: the former Icelandic calendar had years of 52 or 53 weeks. Origin of the Seven-Day WeekThe ancient Babylonians are known to have observed a seven-day week; each day dedicated to a different deity. The significance of seven comes from Babylonian astronomy. There are the seven heavenly bodies or "luminaries" normally visible to the naked eye (the Sun, Moon, and 5 visible planets), and they associated each with a deity. Babylonian use of the seven-day week may have influenced other cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The biblical account of the creation also includes a seven-day week; according to which God laboured for six days and rested on the seventh, and the Ten Commandments which contained God's instruction to observe the week. Others speculate that the fixed 7-day period is a simplification of 1/4 of a lunar month. Later use of the WeekVarious groups of citizens of the Roman Empire adopted the week, especially those who had spent time in the eastern parts of the empire, such as Egypt, where the 7-day week was in use. Contemporaneously, Christians, following the biblical instruction, spread the week's use along with their religion. As the early Christians evolved from being Jewish to being a distinct group, various groups evolved from celebrating both the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and the first day or the Lord's Day (Sunday), to only celebrating Sunday. In the early 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine regulated the use of the week due to a problem of the myriad uses of various days for religious observance, and established Sunday as the day for religious observance and rest for all groups, not just those Christians and others who were already observing Sunday. The Jews retained their (at least) 800-year-old tradition of Saturday observance. Later, after the establishment of Islam, Friday became that religion's day of observance -- however the Islamic week still begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday, just like the Jewish-Christian week. The 7-day week soon became a practice among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Following European colonization and the subsequent rise of global corporate business, the 7-day week has become universal in keeping time, even in cultures that did not practise it before. Days of the WeekIn English the names of the days mostly come from Germanic gods and goddesses (Saturday being the only one named after a Roman god). In most Romance languages (Spanish and French for example in the table below), the names of the days come from Roman gods, and have corresponding astrological symbols:
The Spanish or French "Domingo" or "Dimanche" break from the pattern of using the Roman associations in favor of a Christian association: Sunday being the Christian day of rest, these days are named after the "day of our Lord". Saturday and Sunday are commonly called the weekend and are days of rest and recreation in most western cultures. "Friday" and "Saturday" are days of rest in Muslim and Jewish countries. Facts and Figures
In a Gregorian mean year there are exactly 365.2425 days, and thus exactly 52.1775 weeks (unlike the Julian year of 365.25 days, which does not divide evenly into weeks). There are exactly 20871 weeks in 400 Gregorian years, so 25 December 1601 was a Tuesday just like 25 December 2001.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia and from ShiningRise.com
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