When primitive man began to count he adopted a method which comes naturally to every schoolboy; he utilized his fingers.  Twice five gave him ten, and from ten he progressed to twenty, and then on to a hundred and beyond.  In making measurements his hands, arms, and feet were at his service.  We are still measuring by feet and yards (standardized strides) in this country, while those who engage in the immemorial art of knitting, and, in doing so, repeat designs found on neolithic pottery, continue to measure in finger breadths, finger lengths, and hand breadths as did the ancient folks who called an arm length a cubit.  Nor has the span been forgotten, especially by boys in their games with marbles; the space from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger when the hand is extended must have been an important measurement from the earliest times.

As he made progress in calculations, the primitive Babylonian appears to have been struck by other details in his anatomy besides his sets of five fingers and five toes.  He observed, for instance, that his fingers were divided into three parts and his thumb into two parts only;[329] four fingers multiplied by three gave him twelve, and multiplying 12 by 3 he reached 36.  Apparently the figure 6 attracted him.  His body was divided into 6 parts—­2 arms, 2 legs, the head, and the trunk; his 2 ears, 2 eyes, and mouth, and nose also gave him 6.  The basal 6, multiplied by his 10 fingers, gave him 60, and 60 x 2 (for his 2 hands) gave him 120.  In Babylonian arithmetic 6 and 60 are important numbers, and it is not surprising to find that in the system of numerals the signs for 1 and 10 combined represent 60.

In fixing the length of a mythical period his first great calculation of 120 came naturally to the Babylonian, and when he undertook to measure the Zodiac he equated time and space by fixing on 120 degrees.  His first zodiac was the Sumerian lunar zodiac, which contained thirty moon chambers associated with the “Thirty Stars” of the tablets, and referred to by Diodorus as “Divinities of the Council”.  The chiefs of the Thirty numbered twelve.  In this system the year began in the winter solstice.  Mr. Hewitt has shown that the chief annual festival of the Indian Dravidians begins with the first full moon after the winter festival, and Mr. Brown emphasizes the fact that the list of Tamil (Dravidian) lunar and solar months are named like the Babylonian constellations.[330] “Lunar chronology”, wrote Professor Max Mailer, “seems everywhere to have preceded solar chronology."[331] The later Semitic Babylonian system had twelve solar chambers and the thirty-six constellations.

Each degree was divided into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds.  The hours of the day and night each numbered twelve.