In Praise Of The Ancient Sumerians

The greatest culture clash in history is not between east and west, or between north and south, or between rich and poor. It is between our modern civilization and the ancient Sumerians. The Sumerians lived about 3,500 years ago, in what is now southern Iraq and Kuwait. But how can we possibly have a culture clash with people that haven't been around for thousands of years?

The first thing that I think of with regard to the Sumerians is clay. They made so much out of clay. They didn't have a lot of stone or wood or metal but they had an abundance of clay. Clay is to Sumerians as snow is to Eskimos.

The Sumerians did one thing completely differently from the way we do it. That one thing was counting. We count by tens because we have ten fingers and ancient people used to count on their fingers. Such a Base Ten system is not always the most efficient. Computers operate on a binary, or Base Two, system.

The Sumerians used a Base Sixty system. This is a little bit more difficult to use because it requires sixty numerals, whereas our system only requires ten. But it must have been useful because successive kingdoms, such as Babylon, adopted it.

Maybe the Sumerians didn't have aircraft or social media but their number system had an advantage over ours. That advantage is easy divisibility. Sixty is a nice, round easily divisible number, whereas ten isn't.

Division is important, particularly when we measure time. By far the most important and frequent thing that we measure is time. We often want to divide up a parcel of time.

Have you ever wondered why we measure other things, such as weight and distance, with ordinary numbers, but when we measure some things we have to use some special number system?

One of those things is time. We do measure time on a large scale with ordinary numbers, such as the number of minutes, hours or days. But we cannot specify time with ordinary numbers. For that we use the o'clock system, and it is not based on ten.

The number of hours in a day is 12, or 24 with AM and PM. The number of seconds in a minute, and minutes in an hour, is sixty. The Sumerians are still with us, in the most important thing that we measure their system has proven to be superior.

What about the number of degrees in a circle, including measurement of latitude and longitude. Again it is not based on ten, and we do not use our usual numbers. There are 360 degrees in a circle and a right angle is 90 degrees. The Sumerian system has proven superior again.

Another way we see the lack of divisibility in our number base is how stores tend to sell things by the dozen, rather than by tens. If a family is having eggs for dinner then a dozen is more likely to be evenly divisible between a number of people.