Note 536 — Chapter VI · LUNAR CALENDARS AND THE WEEK

This custom explains the widespread practice of beginning the civil day at sunset or, more accurately, in the interval between the going-down of the sun and complete darkness. The necessities of a calendar system requiring that the first day of the month should be counted from the same moment that the month itself is supposed to begin, it follows that the other days of the month must also be calculated from evening to evening. The noctidiurnal cycle is widespread throughout the lower culture, being found, generally, among the North American Indians, the Melanesians and Polynesians, and in Africa. The same cycle obtained among many peoples of archaic civilization. The Babylonian day began with the evening, and this is still the custom among the Arabs and throughout the Mohammedan world. Modern Jewish communities, in beginning their ritual day in the evening, retain a practice illustrated by several Old Testament passages (Genesis, i, 5; Psalms, lv, 17). Various festivals and fasts, such as the Sabbath, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, were so arranged as to begin and end with the evening. Among most of the Indo-Germanic peoples the civil day, or nycthemeron, commenced at sunset; and the practice, which still survives in Iceland, was not abandoned in Italy and some other parts of Europe until about a century ago. Our English words “fortnight” and “sennight” are reminiscent of this ancient custom. See G. A. Wilken, “Het tellen bij nachten bij de volken van het maleisch-polynesische ras,” Bijdragen tot de taal- land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 1886, fifth series, pt. i, 378-392; A. Fischer, “‘Tag und Nacht’ im arabischen und die semitische Tagesberechnung,” Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Klasse der königlichsächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1909, xxvii, 741-758; O. Schrader, Reallexikon, p. 845; S. Reinach, “Die,” in Daremberg and Saglio, op. cit., iii, 168 sq., G. Bilfinger, Der bürgerliche Tag, Stuttgart, 1888.