exact definition; e.g. 'So that there lay between them and their home a distance of two days or three nights.'[1] With the reckoning of time by nights two other practices are connected. First, the Night has priority before the Day; therefore among the Arabs and the Hebrews (as also among the later Jews), the two peoples which, as we shall see, preserved the feeling of nomadism longer than the Aryans, the day begins with the evening. 'There was evening, there was morning—one day. A residuum of the old nomadic conception is found in the Egyptian myth that Thum, the form of the sun's nocturnal existence, was born before Ra, the sun's form by day. Secondly, chronology is thereby connected chiefly with the nocturnal heaven and the moon. It is to be observed on this subject that in nations which begin to count the day from the evening, the moon is the central figure and the starting point in the chronology of greater periods.[2] Seyffarth, in an essay entitled, 'Did the Hebrews before the Destruction of Jerusalem reckon by lunar months?' (published in 1848 in the Zeitschrift der D.M.G., II. 347 sqq.), endeavoured to defend the thesis that the Hebrew chronology was originally founded on solar months, which were not supplanted by lunar months till between the second and fourth century after Christ; but he supports this theory by arguments which cannot stand against profounder criticism. It must rather be assumed that the original lunar year at the beginning of agricultural life was united with the observation of the solar periods (see Knobel, Commentary on Exodus, p. 95), so as to produce very early compensation of the difference between them; but that in the various attempts at compensation, which
- ↑ Romance of ‘Antar, IV. 97. 2.
- ↑ This connexion is found among the Polynesians: 'The time-reckoning in all Polynesia conformed to the moon. They reckoned by nights,' &c., Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, VI. 71. Only the nights had names, the days had none, ibid., pp. 72. Both the chronology according to moons and the counting of days by nights are linguistically demonstrated of the Melanesian group. See the comparison in Gerland, ibid., pp. 616–619.
