OCR Text |
Show WHAT WE HAVE BORROWED FROM THE BABYLONIANS <br><br> We have only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonia. Why is our hour divided into sixty minutes, our minutes into sixty seconds? Would not a division of the hour into ten or fifty or one hundred minutes have been more natural? We have sixty divisions on the dials of watches simply because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B.C., accepted the Babylonia system of reckoning time, that system being sexagesimal. The Babylonians knew the decimal system, but for practical purposes, they counted by sossi and Sari, the sossos representing 70, the saros 60 x 60, or 3,600. From Hipparchus, that system found its way into the works of Ptolemy, about 150 A.D., and thence it was carried down the stream of civilization finding its last resting place in the ?? plates of our clocks. And why [unreadable]. Again the real reason lies in Babylon. The Greeks learned from the Babylonians the art of dividing gold and silver for the purpose of trade. It has been proved that the current gold piece of western Asia was exactly the sixtieth part of a Babylonia ?? or mina. It was nearly equal to our sovereign. The difficult problem of the relative value of gold and silver in a bi-monetary currency had been solved to a certain extent in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom, the proportion between gold and silver being fixed at 1 to 131.3 The silver shekel current in Babylon was heavier than the gold shekel in the proportion of 1313 to 10, and had, therefore, the value of one-tenth of a gold shekel; and the half-silver shekel called by the Greeks a drachma, was worth one twentieth of a gold shekel. The drachma, or half-silver shekel, may therefore be looked upon as the most ancient type of our own silver shilling in its relation of one twentieth of our gold sovereign. <br><br> Max Muller. |