this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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I learned recently that it was the Babylonians who invented the hour and the minute as a unit of time, and they used base 60, which I thought was pretty neat. Then we created seconds and milliseconds in base 10.
IIRC, they picked 60 because it could be evenly divided into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, and 1/6 which allowed them to stick to whole numbers more easily.
If you use your thumb to count the sections of 4 fingers you get 12.
Then you hold up a finger on your other hand. When all 5 are up you have 60.
I have never accepted this explanation. Yes, using base 12 is logical and well documented. But that means you've got 12 on the other hand as well. 144 would've made more sense.
It was defined around making trade easy, which very frequently relied on simple division of things measured to fixed units (because you had fixed sets of weights)
Yeah, what that user is describing is a mixed base system, which is pretty uncommon-- but then again, not for the people who invented time, since we have either 24|60|60 or 2|12|60|60 divisions for that. 5|12 would not be that weird.
Same reason there are 12 inches in a foot.
Any idea how they tracked time? AFAIK solar clocks are not consistent during the year. I can imagine some sort of water clock, but they would need a master one to use as reference or very accurate specifications to reproduce.
Solar clocks are consistent during the year because noon is always at local noon. They just stop telling time effectively early or later depending on the season (i.e. how long the sun is shining). You just measure time around noon and you are always accurate to local time (even the modern era navy did this). It only matters if you need to synchronize time from very far away, which ancient people didn't really need to do do.
I mean in the sense of measuring hours. Is it a constant angle from noon to 13:00, for example?
Even the "local noon" would drift of you want you measure with constant hours of a24th of a day.
Within a margin of a few minutes (i think 15 minutes at the most).
We are talking about a matter 20 to 30 seconds here.