Why Base 60?

Speculative:

Actually, 60 is used pretty often our daily life. The most common one will be time. We have 60 mins in an hour and 60 seconds in a min. Moreover, 360 (60*6) is also used commonly. A full circle has 360 degree. My guess is that because 60/360 has a lot of factors, therefore it is easy to divide among parties. Especially, when money may not be common or used at all. Also, maybe there wasn't a well developed decimal system, hence a greater need to divide things properly.  I know in French, it has a mix of base-10 and 20 system. I am not aware of any other interesting counting system.

Research:

Upon my research, many of my predictions are correct. Besides the points I mentioned above, the number 60 is also related to the number of days we have in a year (assuming they didn't know there are 365 days, but they think 300 (30*5) is close enough).  Moreover, the fact that base 60 is divisible by 3, it makes their system more convenient at trigonometry. A tablet was discovered with Babylonian numeration systems on it and suggest that, Pythagorean theorem was discovered much earlier. I also learnt that Babylonian uses a triangular wage to mark those numbers on tablet. 

Comments

  1. Amanda FritzlanOctober 2, 2022 at 2:11 PM

    Base 60 seems to have developed for multiple reasons in Babylonian society. You make a good point about the facility for dividing and trade.

    ReplyDelete

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