Let’s Talk About Sexagesimal, Baby

What rules time and space and is not seen or even real?

I will give you 60 seconds to think about it. Take a full 360-degree spin and look all around you. 

Obviously, you have found it -- it was in your own hands, in the hands of the clock and in the latitude and longitude of your Earth the whole time. 

Gravity, the hydrogen in our Sun, oxygen, water, carbon, photosynthesis, and the sexagesimal (60) system are all what compose our reality. Let’s look at 7 reasons why the number 60 rules your life.

First, the Sumerians, the world’s first acclaimed civilization, created this base 60 or sexagenary system. So, it has been with us from the start. We got lucky that they created it, picked it and stuck with it. The Chinese language is forever stuck with its pictographic writing system because it advanced too far into its script to reverse course and adopt an ever-easier-and-more-efficient alphabetic system. Conversely, the sexagesimal system has been a magnificent and magnanimous lottery jackpot. 

It could be said that three wisemen from the East brought us three super gifts: the nimble alphabet from Egypt, the 0-9 Indo-Arabic number system with its super power -- the place-value system, and the Sumerian sexagesimal base 60 system. Now, humanity had everything it needed to leave the firmament and go to the dark side of the moon.

It seems totally relevant and also completely coincidental that even to this day the “official” world history claims that the Sumerians had 12 city-states. Soon, we will see how 12 took over the world too. 

Second, it is great for counting in a world with little more than one’s own fingers. 10 fingers are good for counting, but you can count to 12 with only one hand. Use your thumb to count the three little sections on each of the four fingers and you get to 12. And it is a bonus that you can use your other hand to keep track of the dozens - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 …or 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60.  Sexagesimal is back “in da house.”

Third, 60’s divisibility rules as king. It can be divided evenly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. That is a monstrous functionality for someone looking for a way to subdivide quantities within his realm. 

Fourth, both 10 and 12 work very princely within the sexagesimal’s 60 reign. Though the decimal or base 10 system cannot be divided as easily and as often as the duodecimal or base 12 system, they are both very useful to us in seemingly countless ways. 10 can be divided evenly by just 1, 2 and 5. 12 betters that because it can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. The metric system is ruled by 10 yet a foot is 12 inches. Now you can see why the world of humanity has resonated between the decimal and duodecimal systems, and it is usually always using one of the two systems – the 10 plagues of Egypt and the 10 Commandments AND the 12 sons of Jacob, 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples of Jesus. And when Judas was removed, they officially voted to add Matthias in order to keep the 12. Going that 1 extra, a baker’s dozen includes a mysterious 13th item in an actual dozen so that these English bakers wouldn’t be fined for cheating a customer. 

Fifth, the Sumerians “cut” time into years with 12 months and days with 12 hours. But it took a long while and many civilizations to get us to our current system of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 30 days in a month and 12 months in a year. It took Julius Caesar to make the tenth month, aptly called December, the twelfth month? No way! Maybe that is why they killed him?

Sixth, the 360-degree circle is connected to base 60, even if we aren’t exactly sure how. The Sumerian/Babylonian year was broken into 360 days. It is wondered if the 6 60-degree equilateral triangles that make up a hexagon might be a source of the 360-degree circle. If the polar bears near the 90-degree North Pole and the penguins near the 90-degree South Pole ever met, maybe they can figure it out.

Last and maybe the most is seventh. Seven became the ultimate emperor of numbers. All of the numbers 1 – 6 can cut cleanly and evenly through 60 giving you divisions of 60, 30, 20, 15, 12 and 10.  But when the number 7 divides into 60, it creates an abhorrible 8.57142857143 answer. Ugh! What is that mess?

Magic was what the Sumerians decided. It kind of became the mysterious answer to many random and yet important things. 

In what has been called the world’s oldest story (and it is told on 12 tablets), the god-king Gilgamesh of Uruk had to stay awake for 7 nights in order to get a stick of everlasting life.  If you were wondering, yes, he did get it, but a snake ate it. 

The goddess Inanna - the one who gave another stick or tree of life to the city of Eridu after the world’s epic global flood – herself had a near permanently lethal brush with the number 7. This goddess of fertility wanted to go into the underworld to observe the funeral of the Bull of Heaven (killed by Gilgamesh) and to visit her sister Ereshkigal, who was married to the god of the underworld Nergal. In order to get into this underworld, Inanna had to take off a piece of clothing as she went through each of 7 doorways. After the 7th doorway, she was technically a naked, dead skeleton and now a permanent resident of the underworld. After Inanna found herself trapped there forever, her family of gods in the sky/heavens had to negotiate her release – but they could only get her free for 6 months of the year. So now, the goddess Inanna, or fertility itself, was only allowed to grow the world for the 6 months of “summer” and she had to spend “winters” in the underworld. The Sumerian seasons were born. 

A long story short, 7 is a foundational number in our days of the week via the Biblical story of the days of creation in the book of Genesis, and this resulted in it being a very important number in Jewish history (for example as the year of jubilee or freedom ever 7 years), God’s day of rest known as the Sabbath -- also known as “the original weekend” and a hopeful “lucky” bet. 

The movie Gone in 60 Seconds, the 60 Minutes TV news magazine and proverbial seven-year itch, were all born on the same day when someone decided the sexagesimal system should rule the world for all time.