This has resulted from a compromise. Initially, months were mostly 29 days long and the average length of a month was 29.5 days which is the time taken by the Moon to orbit the Earth. However, this resulted in a year of only 354 days while the orbital period of the Earth is 365.2422 days. As a result, the calender became out of sync with seasons which was bad. This was initially corrected in an arbitrary way by adding a 13th month, but soon the calender was thrown into severe …

With the birth of mechanical watches, around the thirteenth century, it was established the habit of splitting time in 60 smaller parts, all equal, each of which was called in Latin “pars minuta prima” which means “first small part” then cut short ‘minutes’, and these in turn were divided into 60 shares still other smaller, each of which was called, in Latin, secunda pars minuta (second small part), then cut short’ second ‘.
The choice of the number 60 is traced back to Sumerian, which had divided the circle in 360 …