Note 579 — Chapter VI · LUNAR CALENDARS AND THE WEEK

Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, i, 4; Brugsch, Ägyptologie, p. 331; E. Mahler, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1901, n.s., xxxiii, 55 sqq. Mahler’s hypothesis that the Egyptians looked upon the full moon as the completion of the lunation is not improbable; there are several passages in the Vedas where the full moon is indicated as the end of the month and at the same time as the beginning of the next month (Thibaut, op. cit., p. 12). The evidence yielded by the Calendar of Coligny has been thought to imply that originally the Sequani of Gaul counted the months from full moon to full moon (R. Thurneysen, in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 1899, ii, 526). The Melanesians of New Georgia do not seem to calculate long periods of time at all: “one full moon to another is as far as they usually go” (B. T. Somerville, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1897, xxvi, 404).