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it is discovered in the monuments of the far past.
If this view is accepted, the much discussed question whether the original home of the institution was Egypt or Chaldaea becomes almost meaningless. The week belongs to the international astrology of the world whose centre was Rome. It is Chaldaean in so far, but only so far, as all astrology was or was held to be Chaldaean, If indeed we could place its origin so late as the Augustan era of Egypt, we might call it Egyptian. But this view, though I have stated it for consideration, seems to me improbable. No one in fact knew in Dion Cassius' time, any more than anyone knows now, where the week began. It is the fruit of a movement not of a country. We may safely say that, so far as the Empire is concerned, it spread from east to west, not from west to east, but nothing more.
Before I leave this subject of the antiquity of the planetary week, I would repeat a little more fully of the planetary type what I said of the week in general—that the question of antiquity has little to do with the problem before us. That problem is how and why did the week diffuse itself through the Roman Empire in countries which had certainly for the most part known nothing of it. As I have said, the nature of the evidence which reveals its existence to us strongly suggests that it was a movement of the masses,
