Origin of the Seven Weekdays

This video investigates the origins of the modern seven-day week and its planetary naming system—typically attributed to Babylonian or Greco-Roman influence—and examines how these ideas align more directly with ancient Indian sources like the Surya Siddhanta and Bhagavatam.

The project began with a survey of textbook explanations on the seven-day week, followed by a comparative study of primary references from Sanskrit astronomical texts. The Surya Siddhanta outlines a method of assigning each of the 24 hours of a day to a celestial body (graha), in a looped sequence based on their perceived speed—from Saturn (slowest) to the Moon (fastest). This sequence determines which planet rules the first hour of each new day, and by extension, the name of the day itself—Ravi-vaar, Soma-vaar, etc.

To explain this visually, I created a loop-based animation demonstrating the hour-to-day mapping mechanism. I also illustrated how this system traveled out of India, was adopted and translated by various civilizations (Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes), and eventually came back to India through colonial education systems—disconnected from its original Indic context.

The video also addresses the misconception that the division of the day into 24 hours is of Greek origin, pointing instead to early Indian textual references that describe the day being split into 24 parts, known as horā—a term derived from ahorātra (day-night).

All elements—from the research and scripting to editing, voiceover direction, and animation—were handled internally. The aim was to present a self-contained explanation that invites viewers to reconsider the widely accepted origins of a global time structure