“The proficiency of the Chaldaeans in the cognate sciences of Arithmetic and Astronomy is well known17,18. The broad and monotonous plains of lower Mesopotamia had nothing to attract the eye, and impelled their inhabitants to fix their attention upon the overarching skies studded with stars that shone with exceptional clearness and lustre in the dry pellucid atmosphere of that region. There were no dark mountains looming in the distance to hinder the eye from watching down to the very horizon the heavenly bodies in their periodic movements. Thus as Geometry may be regarded as the special offspring of the Egyptian mind, so Astronomy and Astrology were the children of Babylonia. The results of their astronomical observations were duly recorded on clay tablets in the cuneiform characters, and these tablets were then baked hard, and stored up in the great libraries in their chief cities. It is recorded that when Alexander the Great captured Babylon, he obtained and forwarded to his tutor Aristotle a series of astronomical records extending back as far as the year B.C. 2234, according to our reckoning.”
Certain investigations into these tablets, primarily suggested by a fragment of Berosus which described the method of dividing time employed by the Babylonians, have led scholars to conclude that upon these observations “rests the entire structure of the metric system of the Babylonians19.”
Thus was obtained the famous Babylonian Sexagesimal system. Although the French metric system of modern days has returned to the decimal system, which was the first employed by primitive men, being probably suggested to them by those natural counters, the fingers, the sexagesimal had a considerable superiority over the older decimal system (which the Egyptians had clung to) for certain practical purposes, as the number on which it was based could be resolved into fractions far more conveniently than the number 10. Dr Hultsch (Metrologie², p. 393) arrives at the Babylonian weight-unit thus: the Babylonian maris is equal to one-fifth of the cube of the Royal Babylonian Ell, which is itself obtained from