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.