Years ago, when we were studying astronomy, I would tell my students that the people who first discovered and invented the stuff they were learning were just as smart, 6,000 years ago, as we are today.

Yes, we have more knowledge than they had, but think about what they developed with no previous knowledge to build upon.

As an example, take a circle. A circle is made up of 360 degrees. Half a circle is 180 degrees and one fourth of a circle, is at 90 degrees. Why? Who came up with the idea of degrees and why 360* in a circle instead of, say, 400* in a circle? Wouldn’t 400* be easier to work with? Half would be 200* and a fourth would be100*. Wouldn’t that be easier?

The answer as to why a circle has 360* comes from people who lived in present day Iraq, 6,500 yeas ago.

These were the Sumerians, and they were one of the originators of civilization. They built cities and developed an early form of writing. In addition, they adopted the Sexagesimal system of mathematics. This system is the basis of our system of time. It is a base-60 system. We have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. This seems cumbersome until you realize that 60 has the most “factors” of any number between 1 and 100, a “factor” being a whole number that can be divided into 60 resulting in a whole number and not a fraction. The number 60 has 12 “factors”. These are 1,2,3,4,5,6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and then 60.

The Sumerians were also familiar with the idea of triangles. Pythagoras may have come up with his Theorem on right triangles, but the Sumerians knew about equilateral triangles 4,000 years before Pythagoras.

The Sumerians knew that if you took six equilateral triangles you could arrange them to make a circle. An equilateral triangle has three sides of equal length.

Using the Sexagesimal system with 60 as the base, each triangle was divided into 60 equal parts and six triangles in a circle were 6 x 60 = 360 equal parts.

Thus, each angle making up the circle was assigned 60 degrees (a term meaning steps or parts) and a full circle 360 degrees.

Like 60, the number 360 has a lot of “factors”, 24 to be exact. The same 12 factors as 60, but also 8, 9, 18, 24, 36, 40, 45, 72, 90, 120, 180, and 360. Using this system, they broke the day down into 24 factors, which we call hours!

The Sumerians may have been the most civilized people in the “West” until the rise of the Babylonians 2,000 years later. The Babylonians adopted many of the cultural and scientific accomplishments of the Sumerians and they used the Sexagesimal system until they were conquered by Persia in 539 B.C.

We use the Sumerian discoveries every day, but do you think you could have come up with them? I know I couldn’t have and thus I stand by my opening statement. The Sumerians 6,000 years ago were every bit as smart as we are today…they just didn’t have the benefit of the knowledge that we have. Knowledge that they developed for us.