The number seven (1)

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While speaking of Apollo’s connection with the number seven, scholars plausibly assume Near Eastern, ultimately Mesopotamian influence. It should be specified that the number seven is the number of the sun. For this matter, let us first address Greek material. In the Odyssey, Helios possesses seven flocks of rams and seven flocks of sheep. Poets and scholiasts speak of Helios’ seven sons and seven daughters. His famous statue in Rhodes was seventy cubits high. In Iran, the seventh day was dedicated to Mithras, who is frequently described by scholars as the god of celestial light and who is identified in the cuneiform texts with the sun-god Šamaš. In India, seven horses of the chariot of the sun are repeatedly mentioned in the Vedas.

Yet the connection is well-attested already in Sumerian literature. The sun-god, “youthful Utu” gives seven warriors to Gilgameš (Gilgameš and Huwawa 34-50). We hear about “Utu’s river of the seven mouths” (Lugalbanda and the Anzud bird 35). Gudea, the king of Lagaš, builds for Ningirsu a temple of seven divisions, probably of seven floors, while Ningirsu has some characteristic features of the sun-god.

The symbolism of the number seven is usually interpreted as derived from the seven planets known to the ancients. The number of instances where such a link is present is countless, but they all are relatively late. On what we know, the symbolic use of the number seven is earlier than the notion of the seven planets. Moreover, it is easy to see that this notion is by no means something that suggests itself. First of all, one has to discover that the Morning star and the Evening star are in fact one and the same planet. Otherwise there would be six and not five wandering stars. Now, the sun and the stars do not shine at the same time. Bringing the planets and the sun into one group is a most nontrivial idea. It requires tracing the path of the sun relative to the stars. And even with all the necessary knowledge available, it is psychologically not easy to ignore so obviously the similarity of the planets with the stars and so obviously their dissimilarity with the sun and moon, in favour of the scientific conclusion that all seven display a somewhat similar movement, relative to the so-called fixed stars. The common characteristics of their movement did not require their formulaic expression as ‘seven planets’. One may even conjecture that it was the already wide-spread symbolism of the number seven that made possible the emergence of the formula ‘seven planets’.

A connection between the number seven and the sun is so to speak natural. For this number marks the most important period of the sun’s movement, i.e. its movement from solstice to solstice. During half a year after the summer solstice the sun rises further and further south and describes an ever shorter arc above the earth, while the nights are getting increasingly longer, and there begins the time of dark and cold season. So we are eagerly waiting for reversed movement, from the winter solstice to the summer solstice, noting how the sun is now rising ever further north and moves higher above our heads. The winter is giving place to the summer. The people of Greece, Iran, India, and Mesopotamia used a lunar calendar. Their sun returned from the winter solstice to the summer solstice in six months — on the seventh.

It may seem surprising that the division of a year of twelve months into two halves results in marking a half-year period by the number seven. Yet such a surprise would be misleading, and it in fact may have been that it was too straightforward arithmetic thinking that prevented scholars from looking in the right direction. First of all, a lunar month lasts roughly twenty nine days and a half, and so six months comprise one hundred seventy seven days, which is, say, by five days and a half shorter than a half-year period (we may ignore for the purpose the actual inequality of two half-year periods). More importantly, perhaps, are the habits of reckoning. For instance, the Greeks employed inclusive reckoning far more frequently than we do. They would say that the Olympics take place in the fifth year. A lunar calendar could have provided an additional reason for inclusive reckoning. The new month was typically marked by the first visibility of the thin lunar crescent after a couple of days when the moon is not seen at all in the sky. One month was thus a period between two first appearances of the lunar crescent. If one month is marked by two crescent’s appearances, the two months are marked by three, and six months are marked by seven. Whatever our conjectures about the reasons, we have attested usage. “My working term of duty is seven months of the year”, says Summer in the Sumerian Dispute between Winter and Summer (164-171). One finds in a Hippocratic treatise an assertion that “seven months’ children are born on one hundred eighty second day plus a fraction of a day” (7.436). Again a half year is clearly meant. And we need only to remember that Apollo was born in the seventh month.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Dispute between Winter and Summer 164-171
Gilgameš and Huwawa 34-50
Hippocratic Corpus, On the Seventh Day of Diseases 7.436
Homer, Odyssey 12.127-130
Lugalbanda and the Anzud bird 35

Bibliography

Dmitri Panchenko

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