3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by DiggyJohnson on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @01:19PM (#31170270)

From my perspective, anything regularly periodic in nature is used to track time: the Sun (years, seasons, days, day/dusk) and Moon (months, weeks, King tides). Consider even the starfield (astrology: years, decades+).

Four seasons makes sense in all of these contexts, and I hypothesize that there are a lot of patterns in nature that are well bucketed into 4 sequential, equal seasons. This is impossible for me to demonstrate, unfortunately. Also, division by by 4 and 12, a year into four seasons is like a month into four weeks. Weeks seem to me to be among our most subjective fundamental time unit.

I see weeks as being the most arbitrary. I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by domino24 on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @02:57PM (#31171607)

I always wondered what it would feel like to not have weeks, or even years, but to live life in a continuous stream of days looking forward. I'm not sure if we would feel a horrible lack of closure or accomplishment, or if it would make us more productive and forward looking and moving. I wonder how much of my life I waste just trying to close out a week/month/year.

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by diroussel on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @04:13PM (#31172591)

I was talking to a Jamaican primary school teacher once. She told me that the songs (Nursary rhymes) that they teach the kids are often based on old English ones ( like ring-ring-a-roses) but any reference to the four seasons have been mutated. Since in Jamaica they just have two seasons; wet season and dry season.

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by dotancohen on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @02:04PM (#31170911)

  > I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.

I especially like that you chose prime numbers. A week composed of a prime number of days will remain the smallest indivisible group of days that a culture will have.

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by joebob42 on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @08:22PM (#31174806)

Well, maybe, except that months are sometimes prime numbers and we subdivide them anyways, right?

I guess weeks don't exactly subdivide months, they're sort of separate systems?

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by DiggyJohnson on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @05:07PM (#31173188)

Agreed, glad you called this out! I was thinking about rambling about this, but this is a topic I can go on and on about, and I was already off to a slow start today...

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Re:3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why pe... by dotancohen on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @02:05AM (#31176845)

Please ramble! I've actually though much about this as well. It kind of forces a "holy day" because without one nothing fits into one week with any period other than "every day" or "every week" - be that week 5 or 7 or 11 days. I've heard that the seven day week was independently developed at least three times in ancient times across disparate cultures as well.

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