History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.761
History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.761
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It is possible to advance several theories about the origin of the seven day week in India. The five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) were especially regarded by the ancient Babylonians as the powers controlling the destinies of men and therefore five leading Babylonian divinities were identified with the above five planets In course of transmission Babylonian names of divinities assumed Roman forms i. e Ishtar, goddess of love, became Venus, the great god Marduk became Jupiter and so on (vide note 748 above) The five planets together with the Sun and the Moon made a group of seven heavenly bodies In Chaldean temple worship which spread to Syria, it became the custom to sing the praises of each god on a particular day. The name of the god worshipped on a particular day was transferred to the day itself. The days which were sacred to the Sun and the Moon were called Sunday and Monday. Some Norse words like Wednesday (Woden's day) and Thursday (Thor's day) were introduced in England But weekdays in Europe are ultimately derived from the Babylonian gods. It has already been shown (pp 598-600 above) that India and Babylonia had close commercial and other contacts from very ancient times. Vide the recent work on 'Hittites' by O. R.
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Gurney (in Pelican Books, 1958), pp 104-105 and 124 for technical Sanskrit words in horse breeding Vedic gods and royal names in Sanskrit in the 14th century B C It is possible to argue that seeing the temples of planetary gods in which worship was performed on certain days some Indians got the suggestion of a planetary week, as it has been suggested above that the ideas of the Zodiacal signs were derived from Babylonian boundary stones and similar monuments There were Sun temples in ancient India¹⁰⁷⁶ such as that of Mārtaṇḍa in Kashmir, that of Moḍhera in North Gujarat and that of Koṇārka in Orissa. Even now in some towns and villages there are temples of Saturn and Rāhu (as at Rāhuri in the Ahmednagar District of the Bombay State, which bears that name after Rāhu). Kauṭilya mentions the several divisions of time from '*truṭa*' to *yuga* and states that two *nāḍikās* are equal to a *muhūrta* and an *ahorātra* (day and night) has 30 muhūrtas (vide note 681 above). From this it follows that Kauṭilya knew only the division of the day into 60 nāḍīs and that a nāḍī was the same as ghaṭī. The Āryabhaṭīya gives the following table: 60 *vināḍīs* are equal to a *nāḍī*, 60 nāḍīs are equal to a day (Kālakriyāpāda, verse 1) Another way of citing the measures of time is: Time taken for repeating ten long letters is *prāṇa*, 6 prāṇas are equal to pala, 60 palas are equal to a daṇḍa, ghaṭī or nāḍī (Sūryasiddhānta I. 11, Jyotist-attva p. 562).
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Pāṇini derives the word 'nāḍindhama'¹⁰⁷⁷ from nāḍī. Nāḍī is a very ancient word ¹⁰⁷⁸ It occurs in the Ṛgveda and appears to mean some cylindrical instrument like a flute.¹⁰⁷⁹ It appears that the word nāḍī came to mean a period of time when a conch or a trumpet or similar instrument was blown to announce the lapse of one nāḍī (60th part of the day) as there were no clocks then. Hence division into 60 nāḍīs or ghaṭīs (both words being mentioned by Patañjali who is generally held to have flourished about 150 B. C.) was the ancient mode of dividing the day in India and if any Sanskrit work (like the Sūryasiddhānta, chap 12. 78-79) refers to 24 parts of the day, that work may be regarded as one of later times, but the whole system of time measuring by weekdays in India cannot be said to have been borrowed from a foreign source. Even Patañjali refers to the words nāḍī and ghaṭī as long in use before his time Therefore, the division of the day into nāḍīs or ghaṭīs must be held to be long anterior to 200 B. C. On the whole it would not be far from the truth to say that weekdays were not borrowed by ancient India *en bloc* from elsewhere It is arguable that usages in Babylon and Syria might have suggested the arrangement of days into weeks, but there is hardly any cogent evidence beyond similarity and prejudice to show that the origin of the nomenclature and the method of arriving at the order of the weekdays were not indigenous Vide Cunningham in I A. vol 14 pp. 1 ff.
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in which he shows by diagrams how the calculation by Indian ghaṭīs results in the same order of weekdays as the European division. Sham Shastri in Annals of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol IV pp 1-31 after mentioning some rather hazy and obscure passages from the Vedic literature arrives at the conclusion that India was not indebted to the Greeks or Babylonians for week days or for the discovery of planets. It may be mentioned that Alberuni (tr by Sachau, vol I. chap XIX pp. 214-215) illustrates how week-days received names from planets, narrates (p. 215) that it was the custom with Hindus to enumerate the planets in the order of the weekdays and that the Hindus persisted in using these in their astronomical books and declined to use any other order or method even if it was more correct.