#rogerson

Sixty is the base number of the Sumerian number system, fully evolved in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) by 3000 BC, and it remains the essence of how we measure time: sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. The number is also the base of the 360 degrees of a circle, as in the fully imagined sky of the Sumerians (of which only a portion was ever visible from temple roofs), divided into six houses of 60 degrees. In Sumerian culture, the number 1 was expressed by a simple wedge, cut into clay or wood, and 60 by a great wedge. Sixty has the versatility of being neatly divisible by 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2, and therefore makes for easy subdivision of irrigated land and the harvested crops which were initially gathered in sixty-fold sheaves, just as in pre-decimal English currency sixty pennies (60d) were a crown (five shillings/5s).

I was alive in a way I never had been before, in a world that no longer felt stale but instead crackled with breathless promise.

East and West have always been known to mankind as the places where the sun rises and where the sun sets. Indeed our very word 'east' is derived from the proto Indo-Aryan 'aus-to', which means 'towards the sunrise'. Our obedience to the primacy of north (such as the arrow on the compass and the orientation of our maps) is a more recent shift. It is derived from 'ner' ('down'). All the earliest maps, as drawn by the Chinese and Muslim cartographers, are orientated with south as 'up', just as the Emperor of China always sat on his throne facing south, towards harmony and prosperity.

For the true worshipper realises that even to try and express the concept of one is near impossible. For the one has to be both male and female, odd and even, past and future. The very moment we attempt to visualise ‘one’, we put ourselves outside it and create something other – we have formed the observer and the observed; we have made two.

The Seven Liberal Arts divide between the trivium of logic, rhetoric and grammar and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and cosmology. The Trivium were the arts considered necessary for the creation of an active citizen of the ancient world, well educated enough to be able to analyse what was being said, check it for rationality and to be able to speak and answer in his turn. With the addition of the quadrivium by the scholastics of the early medieaval age, the whole basic course structure and purpose of university education was established – which was to create an aware citizen. The system endured, more or less unchanged, right through to nineteenth-century Europe.