Is seven a magic number?

Have you ever felt like cursing whoever invented the seven-day week? Why choose an awkward prime number that seems to have no correlation with the average 30-day month and 12-month year? Well, look no further because the people responsible for all three values ​​have been identified here.

Five planets are visible to the naked eye from Earth (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Combining this with the Sun and Moon, you have seven celestial bodies, and therefore a seven-day week. The Babylonians believed that the night sky was a channel of communication between heaven and earth. To honor this gift, they paid close attention to what was happening above our heads and allowed it to dictate virtually everything, from timekeeping to religion. Often heralded as the beginnings of true civilization, their astronomical culture has had a significant impact on modern everyday life.

“The Babylonians believed that the night sky was a channel of communication between heaven and earth.”

They made detailed observations over an extended period of time, allowing them to identify emerging patterns that could benefit civilization as a whole. The sky changes on an annual cycle, which means that some stars appear before seasonal weather patterns that the Babylonians could have used to determine their agricultural cycle. These celestial “events” were seen as omens, and if floods and periods of drought could be predicted from them, why not other things? In addition to celestial records, smaller political and social events began to appear on cuneiform tablets.

“In addition to celestial records, smaller events, political and social, began to appear on cuneiform tablets.”

Taking this hypothesis to the extreme, they tried to predict the course of their own personal lives and their personality. Essentially, the Babylonians allowed their destinies to be written and read in the stars, and hence the practice of astrology was born. In 410 BC, at the time of a child’s birth, the position of the planets was recorded and the tablet read “all will be well for you,” marking the first known horoscope. It’s not hard to imagine that the standard Babylonian horoscope probably sounds a bit different than the typical modern horoscope – more corn, less “expecting big changes in your love life.” They are also responsible not only for the zodiac but also for the identity of several signs, with Capricorn being the earliest named and recorded constellation.

“The Babylonians allowed their destinies to be written and read in the stars, and the practice of astrology was born.”

Love it or hate it, our lives are inevitably steeped in mathematics and we owe some inner ideas to the Babylonians. Through their vast number of observations, they demonstrated the first recorded attempts to analyze nature using mathematics, and as a result, their mathematical abilities developed to support their astronomy. They were the first to introduce positional notation using tens, hundreds, and thousands, which was much more practical than the clumsy system of Roman numerals. Although we use the base number ten with our fingers, Babylonian mathematics was characterized by multiplication and division tables to deal with the larger base number of 60. It is believed that it chose the number 60 because of its large number of divisors, with a similar decision giving us 360 ° in full rotation. They estimated the value of pi to be 3.125, could solve quadratic and cubic equations, and could calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle – Pythagoras ate your heart! The Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus is often credited with inventing trigonometry, but evidence has shown that most of the numbers on which he based his theories come from Babylonian tablets, and in 2017 Australian researchers found that a tablet from the second millennium BC included table trigonometry, so perhaps he learned about this idea from another source.

Combined with the seven-day week, we can thank the Babylonians for our entire calendar. Choosing a basic number also gives us 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours a day and 12 months a year. The study of the Moon has provided us with a roughly 30-day monthly structure, since one lunar cycle lasts approximately 29.5 days, and this influence became the basis of both the Jewish and Christian calendars. Unfortunately, this ensured a 354-day year, but they reconciled this with a 13th month every 3 years, which works on the same principle as our leap year.

Bottom line, next time the mercury is retrograde and you’re stressed out Thursday and Wednesday because there aren’t enough hours in the day, you know who to blame.