🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <elnaE5InEp.Bys@netcom.com> elna@netcom.com
(Esperanto League N America) writes:

>I have often wondered how (& why) the Jewish seven-day cycle came to rule
>time-reckoning all over. I presume that the Christian franchise widely
>exported it... Didn't the ancient Romans use lunar months w/o any divvision of
>seven??

The Romans had both a lunar month, with days counted up to the divisions
(Kalends, Nones, Ides), and an *eight* day market cycle.  When the seven-day
cycle came into vogue among adoptees of a Greek mystery religion based on a
variant Jewish sect, it was not hard to move from the market cycle already in
place.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_