WHAT BABYLON CONTRIBUTES TO OUR AGE

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 5, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 6

WHAT BABYLON CONTRIBUTES TO OUR AGE.

It appears from the following that old Babylon left “footprints on the sands of time,” which, after so many centuries, still appear among the most familiar objects of to-day:—

We have only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonian. 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 our watches simply because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B. C., accepted the Babylonian 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 sixty, the saros 60x60, or 3,600. From Hipparchus that system found its way into the works of Ptolemy, about one hundred and fifty A. D., and thence it was carried down the stream of civilization, finding its last resting-place in the dial-plates of our clocks.

And why are there twenty shillings to our sovereign? 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 Babylonian mona 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 one to thirteen and one-third. The silver shekel current in Babylon was heavier than the gold shekel in the proportion of thirteen and one-third to ten, 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.—Max Muller, in Contemporary Review.