Dr. Irving Finkel

So what happened was that at a certain level, they reserved counting in 60 for things in a storum.

This, this, this, this, and all those things are 60s.

And those things over there, we have to count in 10s.

And what happened was that the decimal system, practically speaking, vanished.

So you have...

What turned into grown-up cuneiform, when we look at a later thing, you have a single upright wedge, which is the number 1, and also the number 60.

so that you have combinations of wedges from 1 to 60, which explain everything very beautifully.

The reason why this is so important is that when people say, like, we don't need universities to study Assyriology, it's no use to anybody, it's a waste of time, it has nothing to do with us today, and all those sort of well-known arguments, the fact is that the division of our time into 60 wedges

seconds and then 60 minutes and 360 degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance of the numerical system which is already expressed in that tablet, that 60 is the basic counting system.

And it went from Sumerian to Babylonian all the way down to the end of the cuneiform epoch

and was scooped up by the Greeks when they went to Babylon to find out what they knew about everything and found they knew rather a lot.

And they exported data, sexagesimally stored within their own astronomy and mathematical system.

So that's why eventually we have 60 seconds in a minute.

Well, the information in them usually involves produce within the periphery of the estate, the surrounding fields, and the organised work, labour, and so forth, but also with trade, both within ancient Iraq and beyond the borders, because I think trade goes back to the very beginning of time,

long before this tablet was written in, what did we say, 2800 BC?

Well, if we look at a list of early pictographs drawn with a point, where it all begins, you have signs where anybody, when they see them, know what they stand for.

So that is a crucial point.

That's a crucial point.

So we have a writing system, which when we first encounter it,

serves to communicate ideas without any language.