Note 611 — Chapter VI · LUNAR CALENDARS AND THE WEEK

The data relating to the khamushtu are found in some Cappadocian tablets discovered by Golénischeff and others in mounds not far from Kaisariyeh. This city was a colony of Assyria and the last outpost of Assyrian power in the northwest. The tablets are in Babylonian cuneiform script belonging to the age of Hammurabi. Professor A. H. Sayce in 1897 was the first to show that the term khamushtu in these documents represented a continuous succession of five-day periods; and Professor Hugo Winckler later made, independently, the same discovery. See Sayce, in Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 1897, xix, 288; idem, in Babyloniaca, 1907, ii, 1-45; Winckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, Leipzig, 1898-1900, ii, 91 sqq., 354 sqq.