60 (number) - Cultural Number Systems

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:

    “A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
    —Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)

    “I believe if we introduced the Lord’s Prayer here, senators would propose a large number of amendments to it.”
    —Henry Wilson (1812–1875)

    “Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)