God prolonged the century for forty forties”- Russian proverb.
The number 40 was not formed according to the rules of cardinal numbers, because after “twenty”, “thirty” should be followed by “fourteen”, but for some reason people came up with “forty”.
The true meaning of this strange mythological term has long been forgotten. Let's try to get to the bottom of it. But first we have to remember what meaning modern researchers put into the phrase "forty forties".
According to their scientific opinion
"Forty forties" is a number that has an indefinitely large meaning, like the phrase "dark darkness." Or it is "forty times forty", that is, the number 1600. Someone suggested that this is a non-standard, from nowhere, appeared the system of counting forty. There were dreamers who believed that the number "forty" was used to denote a sack that could hold 40 skins of a fur animal (sable, squirrel, marten), or even a large shirt! Like, "forty" is a masculine gender from the word "shirt", in the sense of "undershirt". That is, "one forty" is one bag (or shirt) with four dozen skins.
Some researchers are inclined to believe that the expression "forty forties" means a church union. After all, it was also used to denote the number of churches in Moscow, despite the fact that there was no such number of churches in Moscow in its entire history, even if we count not only churches, but also the thrones of churches. In V. Dahl we read: "According to legend, there are forty forty churches (1600) in Moscow, but there are only about a thousand of them, and they are divided by forty into elders or deaneries, although there are forty or less than forty churches."
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From Noah's Flood to the Present Day
Now let's turn to the ancient biblical texts. The flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights; Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness; 40 years the people wandered led by Moses on the way to the Promised Land; Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai before receiving the Tablets of the Covenant; Lent continues for 40 days; 40 days is the period that elapsed between the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus, etc.
Here are some more examples. The forbidden types of work among the Jews on Shabbat (Saturday) are exactly 40, but only 39 are performed, since the last work - creation (creation of the world) - is available only to God. When punished by scourging in Judea, 40 blows were prescribed. On the 40th day after death, the soul of a person before the Last Judgment in the afterlife goes to heaven or hell. Fortieths - large commemoration of the deceased, serene memory, prayer on the 40th day. It is believed that in the forties, the deceased has his last meal in his home. For Muslims, fortieth is an annual religious tax, which makes up the fortieth part of the available property.
The mythological term "forty" has firmly entered the literature and everyday life of all peoples of the Earth. For example, in Russia a barrel containing 40 buckets was called a measured one, and 1/40 of a bucket (250 ml) was called a “forty”, a forty is a steelyard weighing up to 40 pounds, that is, one pood, a forty-brother is a drinking partnership, a forty-bar is nonsense from many managers.
The symbolism of the number 40 in architecture is no less characteristic. For example, the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul) has 40 windows arranged in a circle. The famous Baalbek temple in Lebanon has 40 columns (some temples of the ancient world had the same number of columns). It is believed that in the Inca empire there were 40 provinces, and the census unit was 40. The famous suburb of Bakhchisarai in Crimea was called "Forty Saints" (Kyrk Azislar).
Unbeautiful stranger
So where does forty come from, and not "fourty" or, as in Dahl's dictionary, fourty?
Before setting out my hypothesis, which was the result of reflections, calculations, analysis of well-known and generally accepted facts that could shed light on the history of the emergence of biblical myths and legends, I would like to remind the reader that the biblical texts are quite scientific, albeit in a peculiar way. set forth (“I looked and did not see, I read and did not understand”), the poeticized history of the Earth and its peoples, closely linked with the doctrine of the “retribution comet”.
From time immemorial, European astronomers knew the version of the ancient Sumerians, according to which an unknown planet orbit with a very long orbital period passes between Mars and Jupiter, but no one managed to prove the fact of its existence. And in 1766 the German mathematician Daniel Titius established a strange empirical pattern for the already known planets of the solar system. It turned out that the average distances of the planets from the Sun (in ac. Units) obey a certain mathematical rule and make up a mathematical series. Later, Johann Elert Bode popularized this rule, and it was called the "Titius-Bode rule". In 1781, William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, which orbits at a distance of 19.2 as. units from the Sun, in exact accordance with the mathematical series of Titius. Then scientists drew attention to the huge gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. And we remembered the version of the Sumerians.
The search for the "mysterious stranger" was taken up by an international "squad of heavenly police". The result was the discovery, but not of a planet, but of a whole belt of minor planets - asteroids. And this belt was located exactly at the distance where, according to the rule of Titius - Bode, the orbit of the unknown planet should have passed. Unfortunately, at that time, the assumption of the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers that the asteroid belt was formed as a result of the explosion of this planet was recognized as erroneous, and put an end to the fact of its existence.
In our time, they have returned to this topic, versions are already being published that the planet was split as a result of a collision with a giant comet … But the ancient Sumerians knew about it and called it a "nemesis planet", they knew that the period of its circulation was just over 4008 years, that of it has a highly elongated elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of the ecliptic at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. Every 40 centuries, it twice, with an interval of 104 years, having circled the sun, crosses the asteroid belt. It is believed that the "planet-retribution" is moving in a huge cloud of meteoric bodies located at a considerable distance from it. When crossing the Earth's orbit, this cloud covers our planet. That is why his appearance in the night sky carries with it the universal horror of global earthly catastrophes - God's punishment for the sins of people.
The ancient Greeks knew the dates of three paired cataclysms associated with the appearance of this celestial body in the solar system: 9612 and 9508. BC e. - the death of Atlantis, 5604 and 5500. BC e. - the so-called world creation; 1596 and 1492 BC e. - The Cretan disaster.
The thrice holy day of Shakyamuni (Buddha) - the day of birth, illumination and death, which occurred on the day of the full moon in May - sets the time milestones of the three cataclysms and determines the time interval between them in 40 centuries, on a year after century scale. As you know, Shakyamuni died on his birthday at the age of 80. His inspiration, that is, the beginning of his preaching work, also occurred on his birthday, which coincided with the day of the full moon in May, at the age of 40 (0 - 40 - 80).
Measure of time
So, "forty" is formed from the word "term", which denoted the scheduled time of the appearance of the "retribution comet", the period of circulation of which was 40 centuries (more precisely, 4008 years). That is, the expression "forty forties" literally meant "[the scheduled] period [after] forty centuries." Simply put, the mythological term "forty-forties" ("term of time") denoted the time of the next global cosmic catastrophe. Remember that a "shirt" is a clean white shirt worn before death. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, soldiers were supposed to wear clean underwear before a mortal battle. That is, the number 40 is a measure of time that is equally important for all inhabitants of the Earth. By the way, in the Hungarian and Slovak languages, the number 40 is denoted by a word that sounds very close to the Russian “measure” (meru, meero). And from the Greek quaranta (lit."Forty"), the words guarantee and quarantine were formed, which were imposed for 40 days during plague and smallpox epidemics. By decree of the Stoglava Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church, adopted in 1551, all Moscow parishes formed seven deaneries, which were called "magpies": Zamoskvoretskoye, Ivanovskoye, Kitaygorodskoye, Kremlin, Nikitskoye, Prechistenskoye and Sretensky (seven is also a sacred number, which meant seven full indications, constituting the period of circulation of the "retribution comet"). Thus, 40 is also an ecclesiastical administrative-territorial unit of Holy Russia. Ivanovskoe, Kitaygorodskoe, Kremlyovskoe, Nikitskoe, Prechistenskoe and Sretenskoe (seven is also a sacred number, which meant seven full indications that make up the period of circulation of the "retribution comet"). Thus, 40 is also an ecclesiastical administrative-territorial unit of Holy Russia. Ivanovskoe, Kitaygorodskoe, Kremlyovskoe, Nikitskoe, Prechistenskoe and Sretenskoe (seven is also a sacred number, which meant seven full indications that make up the period of circulation of the "retribution comet"). Thus, 40 is also an ecclesiastical administrative-territorial unit of Holy Russia.
Nowadays in colloquial speech, the expression "forty forties" almost never occurs, but in the nineteenth century it was used. And let me remind you that in Cyrillic the number 40 was denoted by the letter "M" (thought), as if specifically so that we could think about the meaning of this word.
Mikhail Budarin