Blog Response #2: Why did the Babylonians use the base 60 system over the base 10 system?

 I compared 60 with 10 to try and find out why the Babylonians used the base 60 system over 10. From this comparison I discovered that 60 has more factors than 10. More specifically, 60 has twelve factors while 10 only has four. Considering that ancient Babylon depended on its agriculture, counting inventory would have been vital, therefore the Babylonians would have considered 60 to be more valuable, since grouping stock is much easier with a base 60 system. 

If we consider where the base 60 system is still being used today, we will notice that we still use it when telling time, where 60 seconds equals one minute, and 60 minutes equals an hour. We also use this system in angle measurement, where one revolution is 360 degrees. In fact, if I remember correctly, and this is something that I will have to confirm through research. The reason for a revolution or a full circle to be 360 degrees is because the ancient Babylonians observed that it took approximately 360 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, and since that motion is circular it led to a revolution being 360 degrees. 

My speculation about the connection between a revolution having 360 degrees and the total number of days in year is confirmed by an article by Robert Coolman where he shares that one theory on why the Babylonians chose 360 degrees is because they “understood a year as having close to 360 days; hence the sun moves along the ecliptic approximately 1 degree per day” (2014, paragraph 7). According to a Wikipedia article on Babylonian Cuneiform Numerals, the base 60 system was chosen because it is a “superiorly highly composite number”, meaning it has many factors (2021, paragraph 8). Another Wikipedia article, this time on the number 60, indicates that the Mali empire, as well as the Ekagi people of Western New Guinea also used the base 60 system (2022, paragraph 18). Interestingly enough, the Babylonians did not start off with the base 60 system. N.S. Gill in his article refers to two older groups within ancient Babylon that started with the base 5 and base 12 systems, and eventually merged it into the base 60 system (2019, paragraph 8). I found learning the Babylonian Cuneiform clay tablet exercise very satisfying and doing all this research has made me very curious on what led to the world relying on the base 10 system. 

 

References 

Coolman, R. (2014, April 18). Keeping Time: Why 60 minutes? Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/44964-why-60-minutes-in-an-hour.html 

Gill, N.S. (2019, July 3). Babylonian Mathematics and the Base 60 System. ThoughtCo.  
https://www.thoughtco.com/why-we-still-use-babylonian-mathematics-116679 

60 (Number). (2022, September 13). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_(number) 

Babylonian cuneinform numerals. (2021, November 27). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals 

Comments

  1. Amanda FritzlanOctober 9, 2022 at 4:31 PM

    It's wonderful to connect the development of 360 degrees in a circle to the number of days in a year that Babylonians observed. It is also interesting to think about how the earth is divided into degrees of latitude. I hope that you explore, perhaps with your students, your curiosity about the origins of base 10.

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