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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2022 Aug 6, 16:28 -0700
Frank Reed wrote:
"The common theory, unprovable but certainly plausible and widely accepted, is that the mixed decimal/sexagesimal system of Ancient Mesopotamia was convenient because 60 has numerous factors which greatly simplify division."
A book I read some 40 years ago ("The mysterious dimension [called] time", p. 22, by Petra Pleskotová, 1979, in Czech) too mentions the convenience of the great number of factors that base=60 has. The author writes that Babylonian astronomers apparently did not use their fingers for counting. :-)
She also writes that the division of the modern clock face into 12 parts is presumably related to the 360 degrees of a full circle, which, in turn, is close to the average of the number of days in the solar year (~365) and the lunar year (~354).
Peter Hakel
