[garmaine]

Actually the reason we have base-60 time is that we have 5 fingers on one hand, and 12 knuckles that can be pointed to by the thumb on the other. 5x12=60.

Of course why the Babylonians went with this two-mechanism system instead of doing the same thing on both hands is probably because of divisibility. Get a prime factor of 5 from one hand, and prime factors of 2 and 3 from the other.

(Also note that you can count 12 hours on one hand, a full 24 on both.)

EDIT: AFAIK the Babylonians didn't have a developed number theory, and I'm not sure they even had a formal idea of prime numbers. But we do know from surviving accounting "textbooks" (practice tablets & instructions) that both they and the near-contemporary ancient Egyptians understood the special divisibility of these numbers.

[jarfil]

If binary has taught me anything, is that you can count up to 1024 with 10 fingers...

[masklinn]

If you've got flexible hands and independent-enough fingers you can even count in ternary, up to 59048 (though binary can also take advantage of toes for a limit of 1048573)

[Anarch157a]

Using your hands to signal 4 in binary could put you in a lot of trouble.

[rakoo]

Not a single person I've met has ever used knuckles as a way to count anything, especially time.

[garmaine]

You obviously haven’t lived in ancient Babylonia.

(Pro tip: different cultures have done things differently across time and space!)

[jacobolus]

I have not seen any evidence that ancient Mesopotamians counted phalanges using their thumbs.

I believe that counting method was devised by some fan of duodecimal arithmetic sometime within the past century, and has nothing to do with sexagesimal numeration per se.

[garmaine]

It’s visually built into the cuneiform:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_numerals

[jacobolus]

If that is your evidence then you are tricking yourself, or to be generous speculating wildly.

The evolution here was: physical clay counters; physical clay counters sealed in a clay envelope; physical clay counters sealed in a clay envelope but also pressed into the outside of the envelope to indicate how many; clay tablet with counters pressed into the outside (since the envelopes with counters inside were redundant); clay tablets with little cuneiform symbols to represent quantities, differing by type of object being counted, and not all sexagesimal; more uniform written sexagesimal writing system.

There is no indication in the symbols about how people counted on their fingers.