Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/89

 THE CHALD.-EAN RELIGION. 69 the primitive system, in which the chief element, the ten, could be divided neither into three nor four equal parts." l Two regular series were thus formed, one in units of six, the other in units of five. Their commonest terms were, of course, those that occur in both series. We know from the Greek writers that the Chaldseans counted time by sosses of sixty, by ners of 600, and by sars of 3,600, years, and these terms were not reserved for time, they were employed for all kinds of quantities. The sosse could be looked at either as foe twelves or six tens. So, too, with the ner (600) which represents six hundreds, or a sosse of tens, or ten sosses or fifty twelves. The sar may be analysed in a similar fashion. A system of numeration was thus established which may be looked at from a double point of view ; in the first place from its sexagesimal base, which certainly adapts itself to various require- ments with greater ease than any other ; - in the second from the extreme facility with which not only addition, but all kinds of complex calculations may be made by its use. 3 With but two symbols, one for the units, the other for the tens, every number could be expressed by attending to a rule of position like that governing our written numeration ; at each step to the left, a single sign, the vertical wedge, increased sixty-fold in value ; the tens were placed beside it, and a blank in this or that column answered to our zero. Founded upon a sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and Nineveh was " the most scientific of all those known and practised by the ancients : until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the only one whose every part was scientifically co-ordinated, and of which the fundamental 1 AURES, Essai sur le Systeme metrique assyrien, p. 10 (in the Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a I' Archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes, vol. iii. Vieweg, 4to, 1881). We refer those who are interested in these questions to this excellent paper, of which but the first part has as yet been published (1882). All previous works upon the subject are there quoted and discussed. 2 " Sixty may be divided by any divisor of ten or twelve. Of all numbers that could be chosen as an invariable denominator for fractions, it has most divisors. "- Fr. LENORMANT, Manuel cT Histoire andenne, vol. ii. p. 177, third edition. 3 AURES, Sur le Systeme metrique assyrien, p. 16. A terra-cotta tablet, discovered in Lower Chaldaea among the ruins of Larsam, and believed with good reason to be very ancient, bears a list of the squares of the fractionary numbers between ^2 and |Jj2, or ^ calculated with perfect accuracy (LENORMANT, Manuel, &c. vol. ii. p. 37). See also SAYCE, Babylonian Augury by means of Geometrical Figures, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. iv. p. 302.