The First Ever Date In History Was Sunday 6 February (Or Was It A Wednesday?)

“Nerone Caesare Augusto, Cosso Lentulo Cossi fil. Cos. VIII idus Febrarius, dies Solis, luna XIIIIX, nun Cumis, V nun Pompeis.” So reads a graffito, scratched onto the plaster of one of the many columns around the garden of a long-abandoned private house, the Casa delle Nozze d’Argento in Pompeii.

In modern, cleaned-up English: “When Nero Caesar Augustus and Cossus Lentulus, son of Cossus, were consuls, eight days before the ides of February, Sunday, 16th day of the moon, the nundinae is at Cumae; five days before the ides of February, the nundinae is at Pompeii.”

Okay, perhaps that still doesn’t mean much – but we promise, it’s important. That first bit, where it says that Nero and Cossus Lentulus were consuls, tells us a year: AD 60. Eight days before the Ides of February is the sixth – the Romans didn’t tell the date by starting at the first of the month and working forwards, as we do today; rather, they counted towards three fixed points: the Nones on the 5th or the 7th; the Ides on the 13th or the 15th; and the Kalends on the first of the following month. Also, they counted a bit weird, which is why 13 minus eight appears to equal six here.

But it’s the next bit that makes this graffiti so important. It was, the dauber tells us, “dies Solis” – the day of the Sun. Altogether, that gives Sunday, February 6, AD 60: the first ever date, complete with day of the week, in recorded history.

There’s just one problem.

“The first date corresponds to 6 February 60 CE, which in our reckoning was a Wednesday,” noted Ilaria Bultrighini and Sacha Stern, a research associate in the department of history and a professor of Rabbinic Judaism at University College London, respectively, in 2017. “The inscription, however, equates it with Sunday.”

So, what gives? Well, nobody’s really sure. The most common explanation comes from Pierre Brind’Amour, a Canadian philologist who proposed that whoever wrote the graffito was using a slightly different definition of “day” than we’re used to today, and to understand exactly what that means, we have to delve a little into the realm of astrology.

How the days got their names

Have you ever wondered why the days of the week are named what they are? The names themselves recall long-lost gods: the Sun, the Moon, Tiw, Woden, Thor, Frigg, and Saturn. The last one there is a bit odd, but originally they were all Greco-Roman: instead of Tiw, the Norse and Germanic god of combat, it was the day of Mars, the Roman god of war; instead of Woden, the psychopomp god of magic and knowledge, it was Mercury, the Roman equivalent; Thor was originally Jupiter, the Roman god of thunder; Frigg was first Venus. The reason we still have Saturn’s day, it seems, is because the local Germanic and Norse people who adopted the Roman system had no obvious counterpart with which to replace him.

But that’s only half the answer. Once you have the names, how do you decide what order to put them in? And it’s here that the ancients turned to astrology to guide them: “astrologers assigned the 24 hours of every day of the week to the seven moving celestial objects in the specific cyclic sequence Saturn-Jupiter-Mars-Sun-Venus-Mercury-Moon, which is simply in decreasing order of their sidereal periods,” explained onomastician Michael Falk back in 1999. “In such fashion, Saturn was assigned the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd hours of the first day, and the first hour of the second day fell to the Sun.”

“Each day of the week was then named in honor of the planet to which its first hour was assigned,” he wrote, “yielding the current sequence Saturn-Sun-Moon-Mars-Mercury-Jupiter-Venus[.]”

So far so simple, or at least comprehensible – but as we’ve already established, the Romans sometimes just did weird things with counting. They had eight-day weeks that they called nine-days; they thought that eight days before the 13th was the 6th; and, according to Brind’Amour, they sometimes decided to start counting the planets at sundown rather than sunrise.

Such a shift would explain the labeling of February 6, AD 60 as a Sunday rather than a Wednesday quite neatly – though to be clear, that doesn’t mean it’s for sure the reason for the mix-up. As Bultrighini and Stern pointed out, “the seven-day week is arbitrary and does not correspond to any astronomical (or other) reality, [so] it is just as plausible to explain that the author of this inscription began the week on a different date.”

“On any interpretation, it is evident that the week was reckoned differently,” they wrote.

The first date

Whether due to esoteric nuance or just a diary fuckup, whoever wrote that ancient graffiti was four days out by our modern reckoning of the date – but that’s not really the point. It’s still the earliest known example of a date that’s complete with a day of the week, and as such it marks an important change in how people conceptualized time itself.

It may sound strange, especially since the days of the week certainly existed before then, but it’s not until the first century AD that people seem to have bothered writing them down. We can pinpoint days earlier than AD 60 – there’s an example from 49 BCE that notes that July 27 was the day “before Sabbath”, i.e. a Friday, for example – but “the purpose of mentioning Friday is not to provide a full date,” wrote Stern and Bultrighini.

Rather, in that case it was “to make a point about the availability of Jewish fighters before the oncoming Sabbath,” they explained. “All this suggests that even in the Hellenistic period, the Sabbath – let alone the other days of the seven-day week – was not yet conceived as a structure of time reckoning or as method of dating events.”

It’s for that reason that, as far as we know, we’re unlikely to ever find a full date much earlier than about 2,000 years ago. Of course, it’s possible – people daubed all kinds of things on the walls back then. But for now, at least, the first date in history? It was Sunday – or rather, Wednesday – February 6, AD 60.