In our society, as in almost all cultures, a week has seven days. But in some past cultures, a week had more than 7 days.
Why does a week have seven days? A news article explains that the ancient
Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were astute observers and interpreters of the heavens, and it is largely thanks to them that our weeks are seven days long.
The reason they adopted the number seven was that they observed seven celestial bodies – the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. So, that number held particular significance to them.
Other civilizations chose other numbers – like the Egyptians, whose week was 10 days long; or the Romans, whose week lasted eight.
The Babylonians divided their lunar months into seven-day weeks, with the final day of the week holding particular religious significance. The 28-day month, or a complete cycle of the Moon, is a bit too large a period of time to manage effectively, and so the Babylonians divided their months into four equal parts of seven.
The number seven is not especially well-suited to coincide with the solar year, or even the months, so it did create a few inconsistencies.
However, the Babylonians were such a dominant culture in the Near East, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., that this, and many of their other notions of time – such as a 60-minute hour – persisted.
While we share this notion of time with the ancient Babylonians, we have vastly different attitudes toward food, sex, and ethics than they did.
Ancient peoples often preferred rotten-smelling fermented foods. Ancient peoples often deliberately allowed meat to ferment — even when it developed a rotten stink as a result — because such fermentation made tough cuts of meat tender, and increased the amount of vitamins in the meat, at a time when vitamins from vegetables were often seasonally unavailable. Grey Goose Chronicles describes this in the article, “Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae: What You Aren’t Told About Traditional Diets: Fermenting seals, botulism, ancestral foods and the use of decaying meat in prehistory.”
Ancient Europeans consumed lots of sea weed and fermented fish sauce, the way modern East Asian people do. As Vox notes,
ancient Romans had a surprisingly common recipe of their own. They used it more frequently than salt, and they manufactured it across the Roman Empire.
It was called garum — a salty sauce made from fermented fish guts (such as mackerel innards), which they doused every possible meal in….People had many ways of making garum, which makes it tough to know exactly what most Romans ate but easy for you to make a similar fish sauce at home.
It was so popular that poets wrote about it…While garum is similar to modern fish sauces, most taste testers report that its flavor is surprisingly subtle, teasing out the umami in seasoned foods.
Ingredients
- Mackerel (you may substitute anchovies, sardines, or other fatty fish)
- Sea salt
- Herbs (optional, preferably dried)
- A clay container
Instructions
Prepare the mackerel, using the whole fish or, preferably, only the blood and intestines. Mix it with sea salt — the best recipe with a ratio, from a 10th-century compilation called the Geoponica, recommends about one part salt for every eight parts fish. Dried herbs are optional.
Let the mixture ferment in the hot sun for two months. (Time varies by author, but one to six months is common, though as little as 20 days might suffice.) Stir to help dissolve the mixture and then strain the liquid from the top. Ideal coloration is clear, but your garum’s color may vary.
