The reason your clock has 60 minutes in an hour goes back about 5,000 years. In a deep dive for the BBC, Jocelyn Timperley traces modern timekeeping to ancient Mesopotamia, where early civilizations developed a base-60 number system that still shapes how we measure time today. The Sumerians' choice of 60—possibly tied to counting finger joints, but especially valued because it divides so easily—fed into Babylonian astronomy, where time was broken into precise units for calculations. The Egyptians, meanwhile, were the first known to divide the day into hours, likely using a 12-based system tied to stars or counting methods. Those strands later merged into the system we still use.
"If you're developing numbers for very practical purposes…having an easy way to do these mathematical operations can be really helpful," says historian Erica Meszaros. It was the Babylonians and later Greek scholars who pushed that system further, breaking time into smaller units that eventually became minutes and seconds—even if those divisions were initially used for astronomy, not daily life. These conventions spread and stuck, long before clocks were precise enough to track them in practice. When France tried to overhaul the system during the Revolution—introducing a 10-hour day with 100-minute hours—it ran into immediate problems, including public resistance. The effort collapsed.
By then, the structure of time was deeply embedded. Hours, minutes, and seconds have persisted as timekeeping has evolved from sundials to mechanical clocks to today's atomic systems, which are so precise they won't lose a second in billions of years. Yet even the most advanced technology still runs on that ancient framework. Read the full story.
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