Why are There 60 Minutes in an Hour?

There is a book called "Civilization One" which talks about possible influences ancient cultures had on modern measurement systems. It's conclusions will probably be taken as a conspiracy theory by most but I found the book interesting nonetheless.<p>It actually goes into a theory of why the mathematics was the way it was (based on astrological observations rather than purely number of factors) which offers an interesting perspective on it all. The conclusion is largely that our measurement systems are deduced from our environment and that there is commonality between imperial and metric systems, both being derived well in the past.

I've been thinking about this for years now. I could never understand why no one had ever set 100 "minutes" to an hour.

Interesting, I had no idea that Sumerians counted with there hands in this way. I've always counted like this because my parents and almost every Indian I know does as well.

I don't buy the cause and effect with regards to 360 degrees in a circle. If anything, 360 comes from the close approximation to 365, since pre-civilized humans would care more about the length of a year than divisibility. It's possible that the base-60 system was in fact back-ported from this more important and naturalistic number.

Once when I visited a museum on a field trip, the curator explained that it was because the gene for 6 fingers was actually very common among Ancient egyptians, and so the use of base-6 and base-12 number systems became popular in astronomy and architecture. I haven't heard that since, however, and I'm not sure how true it is.

Wouldn't you be able to count up to 72, not 60 with two hands?<p>12 from hand one + 12 * 5 from hand two = 72

I wonder one thing: How Babylonian and Egyptian exchanged those informations and they use different languages and have different culture... This is more powerful than the Internet :D

Actually, I didn't read all that far because I was wondering why they would popup a facebook bar on the bottom.<p>Any reason for that? Do they get paid for it?

There is a great explanation of why Sumerians use 60 but I can't find the link.<p>In a nutshell the theory is: Sumerians counted each segment of their fingers using their thumb as a pointer (thumb segments were not counted) three segments per finger. They could do that five times using each finger as a holding place, so 3 * 4 = 12 * 5 = 60