Online Reporter
LONDON. – The Sumerians are an ancient people who lived in Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq) from around 5300-1940BC.
Along with many other inventions including irrigation and the plough, they are credited with creating the first known writing system.
This happened to include a number system based on the concept of 60.
Hold up your hand in front of you, bend a finger, and you’ll see it has three joints. Count all the joints on the fingers of one hand (not including the thumb) and you’ll reach 12.
Count this 12 as one using a finger on your other hand and restart the count to 12 on the first hand, until all five fingers on your second hand are used. What have you just counted to? Sixty.
This is one of the speculative theories as to why the Sumerians based their emerging mathematical system on 60, not 10 – a decision that still has implications for how we measure time today.
Their development of written numbers was driven by a need to keep records for the increasingly large and complex farming system supporting their growing cities, says Martin Willis Monroe, an expert in cuneiform (the early writing systems of the ancient Middle East) cultures at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.
Hours, minutes and seconds are a useful heritage from ancient times so deeply ingrained that changing the system now would probably just be too much to handle
There’s no clear evidence that the Sumerians used time.
The first civilisation known to divide the day into hours were the ancient Egyptians, says Rita Gautschy, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Basel in Switzerland
It’s not certain why exactly the Egyptians chose a subdivision of 12 – eventually leading to 24 hours in the full day.
The Egyptians had a zodiac cycle of 12 constellations, but this was likely introduced after the first references to 12 hours.
Counting to 12 using the joints and fingers of one hand is another possibility.
Some experts think it may have been due to how their choice of a 10-day week intersected with the visibility of certain stars.
The earliest known instruments to measure time, sundials and water clocks, appeared in Egypt around 1500BC.
The arrival of minutes
Meanwhile, the Babylonians had also been developing their use of hours. They would ultimately be the first to break the hour down into much smaller units – albeit not for timekeeping purposes.
The Babylonians, who thrived from 2000BC to 540 BC, adopted both the cuneiform script and sexagesimal number system from the Sumerians.
By around 1000BC, says Meszaros, they had developed a calendar based on how long it took for the sun to return to the same position in the sky – a little more than 360 days.
The Babylonians developed a practical time system for day-to-day use which divided both day and night each into 12, as the Egyptians did. – BBC
