The Babylonians established twenty-fur 60 minute hours in a day, with a day being divided into two 12 hour half days. They also divided a circle into 360 degrees.
What do these numbers have in common? They all have a lot of divisors, more than any smaller number, what mathematicians call highly composite numbers. The Babylonian number system was based on 60.This is convenient if you want to divide these quantities into smaller units. We can speak of a half hour, quarter hour, a third of an hour, a fifth of an hour, a sixth of an hour and so on.