

SCIENCE AND PRACTICAL NEEDS 11 



and counting processes, which, as we shall see in 

 the sequel, are essential to scientific thought. About 

 2300 B.C. they had multiplication tables running 

 from 1 to 1350, which were probably used in con- 

 nection with astronomical calculations. Unlike the 

 Egyptians they had no symbol for a million, though 

 the " ten thousand times ten thousand " of the Bible 

 (Daniel vn : 10) may indicate that the conception 

 of even larger numbers was not altogether foreign 

 to them. They counted in sixties as well as in tens. 

 Their hours and minutes had each sixty subdivisions. 

 They divided the circle into six parts and into six- 

 times-sixty subdivisions. Tables of squares and cubes 

 discovered in southern Babylonia were interpreted 

 correctly only on a sexagesimal basis, the statement 

 that 1 plus 4 is the square of 8 implying that the first 

 unit is 60. As we have already seen, considerable 

 knowledge of geometry is apparent in Babylonian 

 designs and constructions. 



According to a Greek historian of the fifth cen- 

 tury B.C., there were no physicians at Babylon, while 

 a later Greek historian (of the first century B.C.) 

 speaks of a Babylonian university which had at- 

 tained celebrity, and which is now believed to have 

 been a school of medicine. Modern research has 

 made known letters by a physician addressed to an 

 Assyrian king in the seventh century B.C. referring 

 to the king's chief physician, giving directions for the 

 treatment of a bleeding from the nose from which a 

 friend of the prince was suffering, and reporting the 

 probable recovery of a poor fellow whose eyes were 

 diseased. Other letters from the same general period 

 mention the presence of physicians at court. We have 



