this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Standardization
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Babylonians were obsessed with divisibility, so they went with a base 60 system. That’s why we still have 60 minutes 60 and seconds. Also the 360 degrees of a circle fits that ideology, because 6*60=360.
Was it really base-60? Like "10" in Babylonian was 60 and they had 59 individual symbols for the digits lower than that? If so, that's a lot of digits to learn.
To represent a number using Babylonian Cuneiform Numbers, you choose a symbol to represent 10 (
(2*2*2)+2) and a symbol to represent 1, and you create them combined in groups that are summed together to represent numbers up to 59 (10+10+10+10+10+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1). When one group is to the left of another, the group to the left represents a number that is 60 times greater than it would if the group to its right hadn't been created. A symbol representing a group that sums to 0 was sometimes used.The Numberphile channel created videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3zzQP3bII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9m2jck1f90
Interesting, thanks, I'll watch the video.
You've almost got it right, but in the opposite way. "10" in Babylonian would just be one character. They would have a different character for every number 0-59 and at 60 it would become two characters.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. "10" in hexidecimal is 16 in decimal, so I was wondering if "10" in Babylonian was 60 in decimal, and they had 59 digits like (0-9, A-F, G-Z, ???)