For more details of the Babylonian numerals, and also a discussion as to the theories why they used base 60, see our article on Babylonian numerals . The Babylonians divided the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. This form of counting has survived for 4000 years. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Babylonian's calculating skills was their construction of tables to aid calculation. They give squares of the numbers up to 59 and cubes of the numbers up to 32.
Division is a harder process.
The Babylonians did not have an algorithm for long division. We still have their reciprocal tables going up to the reciprocals of numbers up to several billion. In fact there are fascinating glimpses of the Babylonians coming to terms with the fact that division by 7 would lead to an infinite sexagesimal fraction. Babylonian mathematics went far beyond arithmetical calculations. In our article on Pythagoras's theorem in Babylonian mathematics we examine some of their geometrical ideas and also some basic ideas in number theory.