Anthropology

In exemplification of the principles discussed in the last two chapters, the next two are given over to a more detailed consideration of several typical ramifying growths whose history happens to be known with satisfactory fullness. These are the arch, the week, and the alphabet.

113. House Building and Architecture

The history of human building makes a first impression of an endless tangle. Every people rears some sort of habitations, and however rude these are, structural principles are involved. Obviously, too, geography and climate are bound to have at least a delimiting influence. The Eskimo of the Arctic cannot build houses of wood; the inhabitants of a coral reef in the Pacific could not, however much they might wish, develop a style in brick. In structures not used as dwellings, their purpose necessarily affects their form. A temple is likely to be made on a different plan from a court of law. Temples themselves may vary according to the motives and rituals of the religions which they serve.

Bewilderment begins to abate as soon as one ceases trying to contemplate all buildings reared by human hands. Obviously a dwelling erected by a small family group for the utilitarian purpose of shelter is likely to be more subject to immediate adaptations to climate than a large communal structure serving some purpose such as the service of a deity. If consideration be restricted still further, to religious or public buildings set up with the idea of permanence, another class of causes making for variability begins to be eliminated. A structure intended as an enduring monument is reared with consideration to the impression that it will create in the minds of future generations. Its emotional potentialities, be these evoked by its mere size, by the æsthetic nature of its design, or by a combination of the two, come into the forefront. Such permanent buildings being in stone or brick, techniques which flourish in wood or other temporary materials are eliminated. Finally, a monumental structure is possible only at the hands of a community of some size. An unstable group of nomads, a thinly scattered agricultural population, cannot assemble in sufficient numbers even for periods each year, to carry out the long-continued labors that are necessary. The aggregation of numbers of men in one spot is always accompanied by specialization in advancement of the arts. Consequently the very fact that a structure is monumental involves the probability that its builders are able to rise above the limitations of mere necessity, and can in some degree execute products of their imagination.

114. The Problem of Spanning

If now our attention be confined to large buildings of the more massive and permanent sort, it becomes clear that one of the chief problems which all their constructors have had to grapple with, is that of roofing large spaces and spanning wide openings in walls. A pyramid can be heaped up, or a wall reared to a great height, without much other than quantitative difficulties being encountered. A four hundred foot pyramid does not differ in principle from the waist-high one that a child might pile up. The problems which it involves are essentially the economic and political ones of providing and controlling the needed multitudes of workers. Architecture as such is in abeyance and the engineering problems involved are mainly those of transporting and raising large blocks of stone. Much the same holds of walls. The Incas, for instance, reared masonry of astounding massiveness and exactness without ever seriously attempting to solve architectural problems.

Once, however, a structure is planned to cover a wide space, it becomes architecturally ambitious. The roof of a large dwelling can be made easily of poles and thatch by such collaborators as a family might muster. But to span a clear space of some size in stone requires more than numbers of workers. The accomplishment also yields definite sense of achievement which is strong in proportion as the extent of the ceiling is great. The difficulties are diminished in proportion as the mass of the structure is large and the clear space is small, but the satisfying effect is correspondingly decreased. A vault whose walls are thicker than its interior is wide, produces as chief impression an effect of massiveness. One feels the solidity of the structure, the amount of labor that has gone into it; but one is left without the sense of a worth-while difficulty having been self-imposed and mastered. Sooner or later, therefore, after men began to hold themselves available for co-operative enterprises in numbers, adventurous minds must have been fired with a desire to grapple with problems of æsthetic construction, and to leave behind them monuments of triumphant solution. The story of these voluntary and imaginative endeavors is the history of monumental art.

Two principal methods have been followed in the solution of the problem of covering large free spaces. The first is the method of the column and the lintel; the second that of the arch or vault. The column and lintel do not differ fundamentally from the idea of the wall with superimposed roof beams. The elements of both are vertical support and horizontal beam. In the arch, however, this simple scheme is departed from, and the covering elements take on a curved or sloping form. The apparently free float of the span is stimulatingly impressive, especially when executed in a heavy and thoroughly rigid material. The beam is subject to bending stress. Timber makes a good material because of its strength against breakage by bending. Stone is unreliable or outrightly weak against a bending stress, besides adding to the stress by its own weight. There are therefore inherent limitations on the space that can be covered by a horizontal stone beam.

115. The Column and Beam

Most early architecture developed the column. Even so superb an architecture as that of the Greeks never rose above it. The æsthetic value of the Parthenon lies in the balance and feeling with which a fundamentally simple plan has been elaborated, not in the daring way in which an inherently ambitious problem has been met.

On account of its essential simplicity, columnar architecture grew up among several historically unconnected nations. In the case of most of them, there can be distinguished an early stage of building in wood, when the column was the trunk of a tree, and a later stage in which the post was replaced by a monolith, or by superimposed drums of stone. This change appears to have taken place somewhat independently in Egypt and in Greece, and wholly so in Mexico. It has been thought that Greek architecture was derived from Egypt, but there was probably little more than a transmission of stimulus, since Greek temples were wooden pillared several thousand years after the Egyptians were rearing huge stone columns. Furthermore, if the Greeks had borrowed their column outright from Egypt, they would probably have copied it slavishly at the outset. Yet their early capitals are without the lotus flower head in which the Egyptian column terminated. Here, then, and still more in Mexico, there was parallel development.

The failure of the Greeks to pass beyond column and lintel architecture may seem strange for a people that showed so unusual an artistic faculty and so bold and enterprising a spirit as they manifested in most departments of civilization. The cause appears to lie not in any internal arrest of their artistic evolution, but in the conditions that prevailed in another field of their culture: their political particularity. The Greek state remained a city. All attempts to establish larger political aggregates, whether on the basis of confederation or conquest, failed miserably and speedily. The Greek was ingrainedly addicted to an outlook that was not merely provincial but literally municipal. The result was that really large coöperative enterprises were beyond him. Paved roads, aqueducts, sewers, and works of a like character were scarcely attempted on any scale of magnitude. With the rather small numbers of individuals which at best the Greeks assembled in one spot, such works were not necessary, and undertaken in mere ambition, they would have encountered public antagonism. Consequently Greek public buildings were, by the standards of many other nations, mediocre in size of ground plan, low in height, without endeavor to impress by sweep of clear space. This fact illustrates the almost organic interconnection existing between the several sides of the culture of any people; it illustrates also the importance of knowing the whole of a civilization before trying to provide an explanation for any one of its manifestations.

116. The Corbelled Arch

The arch brings in an inherently new principle of architecture. It is a device for carrying construction over an empty space without horizontal beams. But it may take two principal forms: the corbelled or “false” arch, and the “true” arch. Both are arches in form, but the blocks that form the curvature of one are not self-supporting; in the other they are.

The corbelled arch achieves its span through a successive projection of the stones or bricks that abut on each side of the open space. The stone at the end of the second course of masonry extends part of its length beyond the end stone of the first course. At the opposite side, the second course hangs similarly out above the first. In the third course, the end blocks again project beyond those of the second. The arrangement thus is that of two series of brackets, or two staircases turned upside down. The higher the masonry rises, the more do the clear space narrow and the two lines of hanging steps approach until they meet and the arch is complete. What keeps the projecting stones from toppling into the clear space? Nothing, obviously, but such weight as is put on their inner or embedded ends. Suppose a stone projects a third of its length beyond the one below, so that its center of gravity is still above the lower stone. It will then lie as placed. Suppose still another stone again projects a third of its length beyond the second. Its center of gravity now falling outside the lowest block, it will topple both itself and the second one. Only if other blocks are inserted behind will their counterweight hold up the projecting blocks. Obviously, there will be more such counterweights needed the higher the side of the arch rises. In general, the area of wall needed as counterweight is at least as great as the area of overhanging. If the arch is to clear ten feet horizontally—hanging over five feet from each side—there must be five feet or more of masonry built up on each side of the clear space. A corbelled arch forming a relatively small doorway in the face of a wall presents no difficulty, but a corbelled arch that stands free is impossible.

The same principle holds for the vault, which is a three-dimensional extension of the virtually two-dimensional arch. The hollow or half-barrel of the corbelled vault has to be flanked by a volume of building material exceeding its own content. This need eliminates corbelling as a possible method of rearing structures that rise free and with lightness. Hence the clumsy massiveness of, for instance, Maya architecture, which, so far as it employs the vault, often contains more building material than spanned space.

Another difficulty, beyond that of counterweighting, which besets the user of the corbelled arch, is that the projecting stones of each course are subjected to the same bending strain as a beam. The weight above strives to snap them in two.

The corbelled arch and vault have been independently devised and have also diffused. They were employed in gigantic Bronze age tombs at Mycenæ in Greece—the so-called treasure house of Atreus,—in Portugal, and in Ireland (Fig. 41). These developments seem historically connected. On the other hand the Mayas of Yucatan also built corbelled arches, which must constitute a separate invention. This parallel development differs from that of the true arch, which seems everywhere to be derived from a single original source.

117. The True Arch

The true arch differs from the corbelled in needing no counterweight. The blocks that form the under surface or soffit of its span are self-sustaining. The true arch thus yields an æsthetic satisfaction which can be attained in no other way, especially when it soars in magnitude. The fundamental principle of the true arch is the integration of its elements. Such an arch is nothing until completed; but from that moment its constituents fuse their strength. Each block has a shape which is predetermined by the design of the whole, and each is useless, in fact, not even self-supporting, until all the others have been fitted with it. Hence the figure of speech as well as the reality of the keystone: the last block slipped into place, locking itself and all the others. The features of the blocks or “voussoirs” which makes possible this integration, is the taper of their sides. Each is a gently sloping piece of wedge instead of a rectangular block. When bricks replace dressed stone, the mortar takes the place of this shaping, being thinner toward the inner face of the vault and thicker toward the interior of the construction.

A true arch in process of erection would instantly collapse if not held up. It can be built only over a scaffold or “centering.” Once however the keystone has wedged its parts together, it not only stands by itself but will support an enormous weight. The greater the pressure from above, the more tightly are the blocks forced together. Instability in a true arch is not due to the bending stress coming from the superimposed mass, as in the corbelled arch or a horizontal roofing. The blocks are subjected only to crushing pressure, which stone and brick are specially adapted to withstand. The weakness of the arch is that it turns vertical into horizontal thrust. With more weight piled on top, the sidewise thrust, the inclination to spread apart, becomes greater, and must be resisted by buttressing. This is what the Hindus mean when they say that “the arch never sleeps.”

118. Babylonian and Etruscan Beginnings

While the exact circumstances attending the invention of the true arch are not clear, the earliest specimens preserved are from the ancient brick-building peoples of Babylonia, especially at Nippur about 3,000 B.C. Thence the principle of the arch was carried to adjacent Assyria. Both these Mesopotamian peoples employed the arch chiefly on a small scale in roofing doors and in tunnels. It remained humble and utilitarian in their hands; its architectural possibilities were scarcely conceived. They continued to rear their monumental structures mainly with an eye to quantity: high and thick walls, ramps, towers ascending vertically or by steps, prevailed.

The true arch and vault are next found in Italy, among a prosperous city-dwelling people, the Etruscans, some seven or more centuries before Christ. All through the civilization of this nation runs a trait of successful but never really distinctive accomplishment. The Etruscans were receptive to new ideas and applied them with energy, usually only to degenerate them in the end. Whether they discovered the arch for themselves or whether knowledge of it was carried to Italy from Asia is not wholly clear, since history knows little about the Etruscans, and archæology, though yielding numerous remains, leaves the problem of their origin dark. The Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians as the Greeks knew them, were however active traders, and a number of features in their civilization, such as liver divination (§ 97), as well as ancient tradition, connect them with Asia. It is therefore probable that the principle of arch construction was transmitted to them from its earlier Babylonian source. The Etruscans also failed to carry the use of the arch far into monumental architecture. They employed it in tombs, gates, and drains rather than as a conspicuous feature of public buildings.

119. The Roman Arch and Dome

From the Etruscans their neighbors, the Romans, learned the arch. They too adopted it at first for utilitarian purposes. The great sewer of Rome, for instance, the Cloaca Maxima, is an arched vault of brick. Gradually, however, as the Romans grew in numbers and wealth and acquired a taste for public undertakings, they transferred the construction to stone and introduced it into their buildings. By the time their polity changed from the republican to the imperial form, the arch was the most characteristic feature of their architecture. The Greeks had built porticos of columns; the Romans erected frontages of rows of arches. The exterior of their circus, the Coliseum, is a series of stories of arches. Much of the mass of the structure also rests upon arches, thus making possible the building of the huge edifice with a minimum of material. On the practical side, this is one of the chief values of the arch. The skill which evolved it eliminates a large percentage of brute labor. Earlier peoples would have felt it necessary to fill the space between the interior tiers of seats and the outer wall of the Coliseum.

Once the fever of architecture had infected them, the Romans went beyond the simple arch and vault. They invented the dome. As the simplest arch, such as a doorway or window, a perforation in a wall, is essentially two dimensional, and a vault is the projecting of this plane area into the three dimensions of a half cylinder, so the dome can be conceived as the extension of the arch into another three-dimensional form, the half sphere. Their relations are those of a hoop, a barrel, and a hollow ball. Imagine a vault revolved on a central vertical pivot, and it will describe the surface of a dome. Two intersecting arches can be served by a single keystone. Theoretically, more and more arches can be introduced to intersect at the same point, until they form a continuous spheroid surface. Neither construction nor the evolution of the dome did actually take place by this method of compounding arches, which however serves to illustrate the logical relation of the two structures.

The Roman engineers put domes on their Pantheon, the tomb of Hadrian, and other buildings. In the centuries in which the Mediterranean countries were Romanized, the dome and the arch, the vault and the row of arches set on pillars, became familiar to all the inhabitants of the civilized western world. After Roman power crumbled, the architectural traditions survived. Even when there was decadence of execution and little monumental construction, the principles once gained were never lost.

120. Mediæval Cathedrals

With the emergence from the Dark to the Middle Ages, architecture revived with an application to churches instead of temples, circuses, and baths. In southern Europe adherence to the old Roman model remained close, and the style is known as Romanesque. In northern Europe the Roman principles found themselves on newer soil, tradition bound less rigorously, and the style underwent more modification. The arch became pointed at the top. Vertical building lines were elongated at the expense of horizontal ones, which in the lower and less brilliant sun of the north are less effective in catching light and shade and giving plastic effect than on the Mediterranean. The dominant effect became one of aspiration toward height. This is the so-called Gothic architecture, developed from the twelfth century on, most notably in northern France, with much originality also in England, and undergoing provincial modification in the various north European countries. In fact, the style was finally carried back into Italy, to compete there with the Romanesque order, as in the famous cathedral of Milan.

As an artistic design a Gothic cathedral is as different from an imperial Roman building as the latter from a Greek temple. Yet it represents nothing but a surface modification of Roman methods. Its essential engineering problems had been solved more than a thousand years earlier. The effect of a hemispherical arch associated with low round columns, and of a high pointed one soaring from tall clusters of buttresses, is as diverse as can be obtained in architecture. But so far as plan or invention are concerned, there is no decisive distinction between the two orders.

121. The Arabs: India: Modern Architecture

In the east, Roman architectural tradition was sustained without rupture and even carried forward in the Byzantine empire. The great church of St. Sophia at Constantinople is a sixth century example of a splendid dome set on four great arches and intersecting with smaller domes at its corners. From the Byzantine Greeks—or Romans as they long continued to call themselves—and perhaps from the neighboring Sassanian Persians, the principle of arch and dome came to the Arabs when these underwent their sudden expansion after the death of Mohammed. In nearly all the countries overrun by the Arabs, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Spain, they encountered innumerable old public buildings or ruins. It was not long before they were emulating these. During the centuries superficial fashion does not stand still in architecture any more than in dress. The trousers of 1850 would seem out of place if worn in 1920, and yet the two garments are identical in basic plan. So with Roman and Arab or Saracenic architecture. The Arab sometimes twisted his columns and bulged his arch to horseshoe shape. He added no essential element.

Among the countries in which the Arabs built is Spain. Hence their architecture, in the form known as Moorish, influenced that of the Spaniards. They in turn carried the style to Mexico; from there it was transported to New Mexico and California, where converted Indians made and laid the adobe bricks of their mission churches according to the plans of the padres. Since the American occupation, the buildings and ruins of the Spanish period have stood out as landmarks, fired the imagination of visitors, and set the model for a type of architecture. Railroad stations and the like are now done in “Mission” style, which in essentials is nothing but Spanish Moorish architecture, as this again is only the Arab modification of the Roman original.

Along with Mohammedanism, the Roman-Saracenic architecture spread eastward also to India. In the sixteenth century Mohammedan conquerors of Mongol origin, known therefore as the Moguls, carved out a great empire in northern India. Prosperity resulted for several generations, and its memory was embellished by the erection of notable buildings. Perhaps the most famous of these is the tomb near Agra known as the Taj Mahal. Set in its sunlit environment, built of white marble, and its surface a maze of inlay in polished stone, this structure seems utterly unrelated to the grim, narrow, upward-stretching cathedrals of northern Europe with stained glass filling the spaces between their buttresses. Yet the central feature of the Taj Mahal is a great dome done on the identical plan as that of St. Sophia or the Pantheon and derived from them. What then one is wont to regard as the triumph of Indian architecture is not Indian at all; no more than Gothic architecture had any connection with the Goths. The one is Mohammedan, the other French. Both represent little else than the working out in new countries and in later centuries of an invention which the Romans had borrowed from the Etruscans and they from the Babylonians. The device diffused from Asia into Europe and Africa and returned after several thousand years, to flourish once more near its source of origin, enormously modified æsthetically and enriched with infinite refinement, but still without radical change.

It is an interesting commentary on the sluggishness of invention that whereas we to-day build in concrete and steel as well as in wood and brick and stone, and erect buildings of greater size as well as for a larger variety of purposes than ever before in history, yet we have so far been unable to add any new type of æsthetic design. Our public buildings, those intended to serve as monuments and therefore summoning the utmost abilities of the architect, still make use of the arch, vault, and dome, or fall back frankly on modifications of the Greek temple with its rows of columns. So far as the outside appearance of modern buildings goes, all our fine architecture is essentially a burrowing in the past to recombine in slightly new proportions, and for new uses, elements taken from the most diverse countries and ages, but forming part of only two lines of development. It may be, when we have built much longer in steel and concrete, and perhaps still newer materials, that the inherent properties of these may gradually force on a future generation of architects and engineers possibilities which indeed are now lying before us, but to which the resistance of the human mind to novelty blinds us.

122. The Week: Holy Numbers

The history of the week is also a meandering one. Its origins go back to a number cult. Many nations have a habit of looking upon some one number as specially lucky, desirable, holy, or perhaps unfortunate; at any rate endowed with peculiar virtue or power. Three and seven at once rise to mind, with thirteen as unfortunate. But the particular numbers considered mystic are very diverse. Few American Indian tribes, for instance, had any feeling about seven,[21] and still fewer about three. The latter, in fact, would have seemed to almost all of them imperfect and insignificant. Nearly all the Americans who were conscious of any preferential custom exalted four; and the remaining tribes, those of the North Pacific Coast, were addicted to five. The Africans were without any feeling for seven, except where they had come under Islamic or other foreign influences. The Australians and Pacific islanders also have not concerned themselves with seven, and the same seems to be true of those remoter peoples of northern Asia which remained until recently beyond the range of the irradiation of higher civilization.

This reduces the area in which seven is thought to have sacred power to a single continuous tract comprising Europe, the culturally advanced portions of Asia and the East Indies, and such parts of Africa as have come under Eur-Asiatic influence. It is significant that seven was devoid of special significance in ancient Egypt. This circumscribed distribution suggests diffusion from a single originating center. Where this may have been, there is no direct evidence to show, but there are indications that it lay in Babylonia. Here mathematics, astrology, and divination flourished at an early time. Since the art of foretelling the issue of events from examination of a victim’s liver spread from Babylonia to Italy on one side and to Borneo on the other, it is the more likely that the equally ancient attribution of mystic virtue to seven may have undergone the same diffusion. In fact, the two practices may have traveled as part of a “complex.” The Greeks and Hebrews are virtually out of question as originators because they were already thinking in terms of seven at a time when they were only receiving culture elements from Babylonia without giving anything in return.

123. Babylonian Discovery of the Planets

The Babylonians, together with the Egyptians, were also the first astronomers. The Egyptians turned their interest to the sun and the year, and devised the earliest accurate solar calendar. The Babylonians lagged behind in this respect, adhering to a cumbersome lunar-solar calendar. But they acquired more information as to other heavenly phenomena: the phases of the moon, eclipses, the courses of the planets. They devised the zodiac and learned to half predict eclipses. It is true that their interest in these realms was not scientific in the modern sense, but sacerdotal and magical. An eclipse was a misfortune, an expected eclipse that did not “come off,” a cause for rejoicing. Yet this superstitious interest did lead the Babylonians to genuine astronomical discoveries.

Among these was the observation that five luminaries besides the sun and moon move regularly across the heavens, visible to the naked eye and independent of the host of fixed stars: the planets that we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This impressive fact must have significance, they felt, and from anthropocentric reasons they found the significance in the influence of these bodies on the fortunes of men. This was the beginning of astrology, which charlatans and dupes still practise among ourselves, but which in its youth represented one of the triumphs of civilized knowledge. The planets were identified with gods by the Babylonians, at any rate named after gods.

It is even probable that the ancient priest-astronomer-magicians were driven to distinguish the full set of observable planets by their desire to attain the full number seven. It is not an obvious thing by any means that the all-illuminating sun should be set on a par with moving stars that at times are no more conspicuous than some fixed ones. No people unaffected by the Babylonian precedent has ever hit upon the strange device of reckoning sun and moon as stars. Then, too, Mercury is perceptible with difficulty, on account of its proximity to the sun. It is said that great astronomers of a few centuries ago sometimes never in their lives saw this innermost of the planets with naked eye, at least in northern latitudes. It seems possible therefore that its Babylonian discovery may have been hastened by an eagerness to attain the perfect seven for the number of the traveling bodies.

124. Greek and Egyptian Contributions: the Astrological Combination

After the conquest of western Asia by Alexander, the Hellenistic Greeks took over the undifferentiated Babylonian astrology-astronomy and developed it into a science. They for the first time determined the distance or order of the seven luminaries from the earth, and determined it as correctly as was possible as long as it was assumed that our earth formed the center of the universe. Ptolemy—the astronomer, not the king—placed Saturn as the most outward, next Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.

This scientific advance, the west Asiatic astrologers again took hold of and brought into connection with the hours of the day. For this purpose they employed not the old Babylonian division of the day and night into twelve hours—which had long since passed over to the Greeks—but the Egyptian reckoning of twenty-four. This was possible because the Greek discoveries were made in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

Each of the twenty-four hours in turn was assigned by the astrologers to a planet in the Ptolemaic order, beginning with Saturn. As there were only the seven, the cycle began over again on the eighth hour, and in the same way the fifteenth and twenty-second were “dominated” by Saturn. This gave the twenty-third to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the twenty-fifth—the first of the next day, to the Sun. This second day was thought to be specially under the influence of the planet of its initial hour, the Sun, as the first was under the influence of its initial hour, that of Saturn. With the continuance of the count, the Moon would become dominant of the first hour of the third day, and so on through the repeated series, the remaining planets emerging in the sequence Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus; whereupon, the cycle having been exhausted, it would begin all over again with Saturn’s day—Saturday, as we still call it—and its successors Sun’s day and Moon’s day.

This was the week as we know it, evolved perhaps somewhat more than a century before Christ, soon carried back into Alexandria, and there imparted to Greeks, Romans, and other nationalities. By the time Jesus was preaching, knowledge of the planetary week had reached Rome. Less than a century later, its days were being written in Pompeii. In another hundred years it was spoken of by contemporaries as internationally familiar.

125. The Names of the Days and the Sabbath

As yet, however, the week was more of a plaything of the superstitious than a civil or religious institution; and it was pagan, not Christian. The names of the days were those of the gods which the Babylonians had assigned to the planets a thousand or more years earlier, or, in the Western world, “translations” of the Babylonian god names. The Greeks had long before, in naming the stars which we know as Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, substituted their Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite for the Babylonian Nabu, Marduk, Ishtar, on the basis of some resemblance of attributes. Thus, Nabu had to do with learning or cunning like Hermes; Marduk, like Zeus, wielded thunder; Ishtar and Aphrodite were both goddesses of love. The Romans, in turn, “translated” the Greek names into those of their divinities Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, which survive for instance in French Mercre-di, Jeu-di, Vendre-di.

In the passing on of the week to the Germanic barbarians, still another “translation” was made, to Woden, Thor, Frija, whence English Wedn-es-day, Thur-s-day, Fri-day. It is true that these northern gods were not equivalents of the Roman ones, but that mattered little. The reckoning of the week was growing in frequency, and some sort of familiar and pronounceable names for its days had to be found for the new peoples to whom it spread. So a minimum of resemblance between two deities answered for an identification. Moreover, the ancients, because they believed in the reality of their gods but not in the infinity of their number, were in the habit of assuming that the deities of foreign nations must be at bottom the same as their own. Therefore a considerable discrepancy of attribute or worship troubled them no more than the difference in name.

For the days of the week, then, which the public came more and more to deal with, these translations were made. Astronomy, however, was in the hands of the learned, who knew Latin; and hence scientists still denote the planets as Mercury, Venus, and so on, instead of Woden and Frija.

Jesus observed the Sabbath, not Sunday, which he was either ignorant of or would have denounced as polytheistic. The Sabbath was an old Hebrew institution, a day of abstention and cessation from labor, evidently connected with and perhaps derived from the Babylonian Shabattum. These shabattum were the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty-eighth, and also nineteenth days of the month, the first four probably having reference to the phases of the moon, and all five being “days of rest of the heart,” inauspicious for undertakings, and therefore unfavorable for work. They were thus tabooed, supramundane days, and while their recurrence chiefly at seven day intervals, like that of the Jewish Sabbath, provided a sort of frame for a week, this week was never filled in. The influence of the Babylonian-Hebrew Sabbath on the development of the week was chiefly this: it provided the early Christians with a ready-made habit of religiously observing one day in seven. This period coinciding with the seven day scheme of the week that was coming into use among pagans, ultimately reinforced the week with the authority of the church.

126. The Week in Christianity, Islam, and Eastern Asia

Christianity however felt and long resisted the essential paganism of the week. The Roman Catholic church in its calendar recognizes the Lord’s day, the second to sixth days, and the Sabbath, but none named after a heathen god. In Greece the influence of the Orthodox church has been strong enough to establish a similar numbering in civil life; and the Slavic nations, also mostly Orthodox, follow the same system except that our Monday is their “first” day and they close the week with Sunday.

Sunday, instead of Sabbath-Saturday, became the religious day of the week in Christianity because of the early tradition that it was on this day that Jesus rose from the dead. An unconscious motive of perhaps greater influence was the desire to differentiate the new religion from its Sabbath-observing mother religion, both in the minds of converts from Judaism and in the opinion of the pagans. The Romans for about a century confused Jews and Christians, no doubt to the irritation of both.

Meanwhile, the pagans themselves, perhaps under the influence of the popular sun-worshiping Mithraic religion of the second and third centuries, had come to look upon the Sun’s day instead of Saturn’s as the first of the week. At any rate, in 321 A.D. Constantine ordained “the venerable day of the Sun” as a legal holiday from governmental, civic, and industrial activity. Constantine perhaps issued this decree as high priest of the state religion of the Roman empire, but he was also the first Christian emperor, and his action must have been wholly acceptable to the church. Before long, church and state were in accord to discountenance work on Sunday; and thus Christianity had adopted the heathen planetary week in all respects but the names of its days. Protestantism finally withdrew even this barrier and accepted the planet-god names that had so long been popularly and civilly established.

The Mohammedan week is that of Judaism and Eastern Christianity, and was taken over bodily from one or the other of these religions. Sunday is the “first” day, and so in order to Thursday. Friday is “the meeting,” when one prays at the mosque, but labors before and after, if one wishes. And Saturday is “the Sabbath,” though of course without its Jewish prescriptions and restrictions. The Arabs have spread this form of the week far into Africa.

But the planetary week of Babylonian-Greek-Egyptian-Syrian origin spread east as well as west and north and south. It never became so charged with religious meaning nor so definitely established as a civil and economic institution in Asia as in Europe, but it was used astronomically, calendrically, and in divination. By the fifth century, it had been introduced into India. For a time after the tenth century, it was more used in dating than among European nations. Again “translations” of the god names of the planets were made: Brihaspati was Jupiter, and Brihaspati-vara Thursday.

From India, the week spread north into Tibet, east to the Indo-Chinese countries, and southeast to the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. In the former lands, it was employed calendrically; among the Malaysians, rather astrologically, and has been largely superseded by the Mohammedan form. Even China acquired some slight acquaintance with the week as a period of seven days allotted to the planetary bodies and initiated by the day of Mit, that is, Mithra, the Persian sun god, although the average Chinaman knows nothing of the days of the week nor any periodic rest from labor.

127. Summary of the Diffusion

This history of the week is one of the striking instances of institutional diffusion. An ancient west Asiatic mystic valuation or magical cult of the number seven led on the one hand to an observance of taboo days, on the other to an association with the earliest astronomical knowledge, polytheistic worship, and divination. A European people learned the combination and built on it for further scientific progress, only to have this gain utilized for new playing by the astrologers. The planetary week, the creation of these mathematical diviners, was reintroduced into Europe and became connected with the calendar and civil life. Christianity recontributed the old idea of regularly recurring holy or taboo days. Mohammedanism took over this concept along with the period, but without the polytheistic and astrological elements. Eastern Asia, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in the latter. With us, the significance is becoming increasingly economic. Names have changed again and again, but their very variations evidence their equivalence. In about three thousand years from its first beginnings and half as many from its definitive establishment, the institution of the week by 1492 had spread over all the earth except the peripheral tracts of Asia and Africa and the peripheral continents of Oceania and America.

128. Month-thirds and Market Weeks

Contrasting with this single diffusion of the seven-day week is the independent development in several parts of the world of other periods, marked either by sacred or secularly unlucky days or by markets or by divisions of the lunar month.

For instance, a ten-day week, having reference to the beginning, middle, and end of the lunation, was more or less reckoned with in ancient Egypt; ancient Greece; parts of modern central Africa; China, Japan, and Indo-China; and Polynesia. No historic connections are known between the custom in these regions; its official and religious associations are everywhere slender, and intervening nations either employ other periods or none at all. It looks, therefore, as if these might be cases of true parallelism, although in that event an American occurrence might also be expected and its absence seems in need of explanation. Moreover there is nothing very important about this reckoning; it is essentially a description of a natural event, and the only thing distinctive is its being threefold. If an institution as precise and artificial as our planetary week had been independently originated more than once, the fact would be more significant.

Regular market days among agricultural peoples have frequently led to a reckoning of time superficially resembling the week. Thus, in central Africa, south of the sphere of Islamic influences, markets are observed by a considerable number of tribes. Most frequently these come at four day intervals. Some tribes shorten the period to three days or lengthen it to five. Six, eight, and ten day periods appear to be merely doublings. The fairly compact distribution of this African market week points to a single origin.

The early Romans observed a regular eighth day market and semi-holiday. This might be connected with the African institution, but as yet cannot be historically linked with it.

In the less advanced states of Indo-China and many of the East Indian islands, even as far as New Guinea, five-day markets are the rule. This entire tract has many internal culture connections, so that within its limits diffusion has evidently again been active.

In ancient America, markets were customary every fifth day in Mexico, third day in Colombia, tenth day in Peru. These were also days of assembly and cessation from labor.

The American instances establish beyond cavil that some of these market weeks are truly independent evolutions. Moreover, they nearly all occur among peoples of about the same degree of advancement, at any rate on the economic side of their cultures. But it is only the idea, the outline of the institution, that is similar; its concrete cultural execution, as expressed in the length of the period, differs in Asia and Africa, and in the three American regions. That the Mexican and Southeast Asiatic weeks were both of five days, means nothing but the sort of coincidence to be expected when the choice of duration is limited to a small range, such as between three and ten days.

129. Leap Days as Parallels

Finally, there is a correspondence between the Egyptians and Mexicans in recognizing the solar year as composed of 360 + 5 days. The Egyptians counted the 360 in twelve months of thirty days, the Mayas and Aztecs in eighteen groups of twenty days; both agreed in regarding the five leap days as supplementary and unlucky. This last fact looks like a close correspondence, but analysis dissolves much of the likeness. The solar year consists of 365 days and a fraction. There is nothing cultural about that phenomenon except its recognition. Careful observation continued for a long enough period inevitably yields the result. But 365 is indivisible except by 5 and 73; 360 is much “rounder,” that is, divisible by many numbers, and these “simple” like 6, 10, 12, 18, 20, 30, and therefore easier to operate with. This again is a mathematical, not a cultural fact. The five supplementary days thus scarcely represent any distinctive achievement. As to their being considered unlucky and evil, that is unquestionably a true cultural parallel.

At the same time, this parallel cannot be enacted into any generally valid law. The ancient Hindu calendar, being directly lunar, had about twelve days left over each solar year end at the winter solstice. These twelve days were looked upon as prophetic and portentous, but not as specifically evil. The Persian and Armenian calendars, seemingly derived from the Egyptian, had the same five supplementary days. But in the former the first of its five is reckoned as lucky, only the third as unlucky; and in the latter, none of the five has any special value or observance. Our own twenty-ninth of February is supplementary and we hold a half serious belief or superstition in regard to it and its year, but this has nothing to do with luck.

In short, the human mind does tend to attach an unusual value to any day in the calendar that is in any way outstanding. This observation is a psychological one, and could be predicted from what is known of the principle of association in individual psychology. When it comes to the social expression of this tendency, regularity ceases. Sometimes the value of the special day is virtually identical among unconnected social groups, such as the Mayas and Egyptians; sometimes it is diverse, as between them and ourselves; and sometimes the value wholly disappears, as in Armenia. Parallelism in any matter of civilization is never complete and perfect, just as culture elements rarely spread far or long without modification.