[TZ] Re: week starts at Sunday or Monday??

[Marc Lehmann]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 05:25:59PM +0200, Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca at renault.fr> wrote:
> > But it was before Christians adopted Julian calendar.
> 
> And when did they?

Sometime between 700 and 1000 AD, depending on the location. Before, they
mostly used the alexandrine era, although a lot of different calendars
were in use (for example, people thought that the year 800 would be the
end of the world, as that year coincided with the year 6000 after the
world creation, another popular calendar). It is also not clear wether the
years ~600-~900 do exist or were just inserted by some calulcation error
during the calendar switch.

> > I always wondered which culture invented the concept of seven-day weeks.
> 
> Because we do not have twenty-nine fingers.

BTW, the number of fingers has almost nothing to do with the numbering
systems we use. The dual system (+ extensions like the 2-2-1 system) was
predominant until the quintal(?) system took over, with a lot of mixtures
between 2-5 and 5-2 etc. systems. The sexagesimal system was also used
(together with a decimal system) by the babylonians, but they used their
three different systems for different purposes so it is not clear wether
they had the concept of abstract numbers. In asia you also often find that
people count to 29 using their hands (hoopla ;), and during the middle-age
systems to count up to 10000 with your fingers were relatively widespread.

Sorry for the divesion but I hope it was at least a bit informative (even
if I translated some of the words from german to english without looking
them up properly ;)

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