Ever wondered why our day, our entire lives really, is neatly sliced into twenty-four hours?
To understand this, we need to travel back, way back, to ancient Egypt, where people were keen observers of the sky and used tools like sundials.
They divided the daytime into ten main hours, adding one for dawn and another for dusk, totaling twelve hours for the sunlit period. They then divided the night based on observations of specific stars, also into twelve hours, completing a full cycle of twenty-four.
Around the same time, the brilliant Babylonians developed a unique number system based on sixty, known as the sexagesimal system.
Now, when these two great civilizations’ ideas eventually mingled, the Egyptians’ twenty-four divisions for a day, combined with the Babylonians’ sixty-based system for smaller measurements, paved the way for our modern timekeeping. Greek astronomers later adopted this base-60 system for their calculations, helping to standardize the division of hours into minutes and seconds.
Why sixty? It’s a “superior highly composite number,” meaning it can be neatly divided by many other small numbers like two, three, four, five, and six, making it incredibly practical for fractions and divisions.
So, our twenty-four-hour day, with its sixty-minute hours and sixty-second minutes, isn’t arbitrary, but a lasting legacy of ancient wisdom, a beautiful blend of astronomical observation and mathematical genius, standardized further by Greek astronomers like Hipparchus and later by mechanical clocks in Europe.