Cultural Number Systems
The Babylonian number system had a base of sixty, inherited from the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations, and possibly motivated by the large number of divisors which 60 has. The sexagesimal measurement of time and of geometric angles is a legacy of the Babylonian system.
The number system in the Mali Empire was also based on sixty (this is reflected in the counting system of the Maasina Fulfulde, a variant of the Fula language spoken in contemporary Mali). The Ekagi of Western New Guinea have also used base 60, and the sexagenary cycle also plays a role in Chinese calendar and numerology.
In German: Schock and in Latin: sexagena refer to 60 = 5 dozen = 1/2 small gross. This quantity was used in international medieval treaties e.g. for ransom of captured Teutonic Knights.
Read more about this topic: 60 (number)
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, number and/or systems:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“My idea is that the world outside—the so-called modern world—can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive instinct of art and feeling, and that our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors—the one- in-a-thousand of born artists and poets—and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.”
—Anne Sullivan (1866–1936)