Have you ever wondered why there was 360° in a complete circle, instead of, say, a hundred degrees? Why there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute? Unbelievable though it may appear, it is all down to the ancient Babylonians.

The countryside around Babylon was pretty boring; no rocky mountains, no forests, not a great deal except clay and mud and although there was the odd date palm it produced a timber which was not really much use for anything at all so the main building materials that they had were mud bricks and clay tiles. They got quite used to using clay to prepare storage vessels, cooking utensils, decorative figurines etc, and and it was not long before one bright spark discovered that by scratching symbols on a clay tablet and then baking it he was able to produce a permanent record, and so bureaucracy was born! This zeal for producing documents made it easy to record the movements in the heavens; with no background light to worry about and few clouds to spoil the view the sight of the planets and stars was extremely clear and the scientists of the day were able to not only observe their movements but also to predict them. To do this however they had to have a system of mathematics and they had to decide upon a primary number which was the most important one and upon which the whole system was based; they chose 60, for a very good reason!

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Their primary number had to be capable of division; 60 is the smallest number which can be divided by two, three, four, five and six! A far more logical system of course than the one that we use which is based on 100, which can only be divided by two, four and five. This is why 60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes make an hour.

Navigation was extremely important to the Babylonians since when they set out on their travels the only thing that they could use to track their movements was the sky and the stars and planets in it and to navigate they needed to have different points of the compass. Why did they decide on 360°? Simple. 360 can be divided by two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine and 10!

One of the biggest mistakes that we make in our so-called enlightened 21st-century is that we assume that ancient people were primitives who lived in caves and wore animal skins if anything at all. The ancient Babylonians are an example of a people whose mathematical system is actually superior to the one that we use today, based on nothing more scientific than the number of fingers and thumbs that the average person possesses. How much more knowledge did the ancients have that we have lost, destroyed or ignored?

Copyright David Williams 2006