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obsolete. This condition is also wanting here. The planetary week clearly presupposes belief in astrology and in the planets in particular. But belief in the planets was not obsolete in the Roman Empire. On the contrary it was exceedingly vigorous, and there is not the slightest difficulty in supposing that the wave of astrological superstition which spread over the Mediterranean world, at a date which may be placed about 200 B.C., should have evolved the further idea that the planets presided in sequence over definite portions of time[1].
One misapprehension should be guarded against in this connexion. It is idle to deduce anything from the fact that reverence for or even worship of the planets is as old as the Babylonian records. That two of these, 'the greater light which rules the day, and the lesser light which rules the night,' should be the objects of awe and reverence to primitive man was inevitable, and when early observation discovered the fact that these moving bodies were not two but seven, the coincidence of this with the number of the stars in the Pleiades, the Great and Little Bear and
- ↑ I should add that the evidence which Rawlinson adduced from the walls of Ecbatana, as described by Herodotus I, 98, and the existing ruins of the temple at Borsippa, is now generally discarded. The idea was that the order of the colours was that of the planets in week-order. The order at Ecbatana is definitely not week-order, and that at Borsippa is quite uncertain. V. Jensen in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Wortforschung, 1901, pp. 157, 158.
