Note 992 — Chapter XXXVII · THE FIGHT BETWEEN MARDUK AND TIĀMAT

The Biru or Kasbu represented the distance walked by an ordinary man in one Sumerian hour, which, as they divided their whole day into twelve, equals two of our hours. The prehistoric Sumerians, like other nations, reckoned the year by the Moon, not by the Sun. The historic calendar-makers endeavoured to bridge the hiatus and correlate the solar with the lunar year by inserting an intercalary month. They combined the decimal and the sexagesimal in their scheme of numbers—hence, though curiously, their multiplication was always by six, not ten. Cf. W. Zimmern, Zeit und Raumrechnung, who instances the twelve—6 × 2—signs of the Zodiac, etc.