Babylonian Base-60 Converter

About this calculator

The Babylonians, who dominated Mesopotamian mathematics from roughly 2000 BCE, wrote numbers in a sexagesimal (base-60) positional system rather than base-10. Each position represents a power of 60 instead of a power of 10, so a value like 83 becomes "1,23" — one group of 60 plus 23 units — using cuneiform wedge-and-hook symbols built from just two glyphs repeated up to 59 times. Base 60 survives today in how we split hours into minutes and seconds, and degrees into arcminutes and arcseconds, precisely because the Babylonians chose it for its rich divisibility (60 has ten divisors, versus four for 10).

This calculator takes a decimal whole number and breaks it into its base-60 place values, showing each sexagesimal digit the way a Babylonian scribe would have arranged them on a clay tablet. Historians of mathematics, educators teaching numeral systems, and students studying ancient Mesopotamia use it to see the mechanics of a place-value system that predates decimal notation by millennia, and to check hand conversions when working through cuneiform tablet transcriptions.