The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week"Days, months, and years were given to us by nature, but we invented the week for ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about a seven-day cycle, or about any other kind of week; it represents an arbitrary rhythm imposed on our activities, unrelated to anything in the natural order. But where the week exists—and there have been many cultures where it doesn't—it is so deeply embedded in our experience that we hardly ever question its rightness, or think of it as an artificial convention; for most of us it is a matter of 'second nature.' |
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Contents
The Origins of the SevenDay Week | 7 |
The SevenDay Wars | 29 |
Cultural Variations on a Theme | 46 |
The Harmonics of Timekeeping | 62 |
Living with the Week | 85 |
Experiencing the Week | 109 |
Culture Not Nature | 132 |
Notes | 144 |
| 174 | |
Author Index | 193 |
| 201 | |
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Common terms and phrases
364-day calendar actually ancient associated astrological astrological week Baha'i Book of Jubilees calen Calendar Reform Central American Christian Church Colson Continuous Working Week cultural Dead Sea Scrolls decadal designated distinctive divinatory Dominical Letters essentially example fact festivals five-day French Republican calendar Friday Hidden Rhythms ibid Indonesian International Fixed Calendar Jewish week Journal of Calendar Judaism Jupiter London Lord's Day lunar market week Mathiez Maya Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Mercury Monday month Moon namely night observance obviously original particular days Patterns period Pitirim Sorokin planetary planets precise multiples regard regularly Rest Days Roman routine Sabbath Saturday Saturn schedule seven seven-day cycle seven-day week significance six-day social solar Sorokin Soviet Sunday temporal Thursday tion tonalamatl traditional trimesters Tuesday University Press Venus Webster Wednesday week-calendar weekday weekend weekly cycle weekly day weekly rhythm West Africa workweek World Calendar York Zerubavel
Popular passages
Page 6 - And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week |
| Author | Eviatar Zerubavel |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press, 1989 |
| ISBN | 0226981657, 9780226981659 |
| Length | 206 pages |
| Subjects | › History / General Science / General Science / Time |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |