The Origin of the Mystical Number Seven in Mesopotamian Culture; Division by Seven in the Sexagesimal Number System

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical and mathematical significance of the number seven in Mesopotamian culture, focusing on its unique properties in the sexagesimal system and its cultural mysticism.

Contribution

It analyzes the mathematical peculiarities of the number 7 in the ancient sexagesimal system and its cultural implications in Mesopotamian mysticism.

Findings

Reciprocal of 7 cannot be finitely expressed in sexagesimal system

Number 7's unique recurrence pattern influenced cultural mysticism

Seven was a key symbolic number in Mesopotamian numerology

Abstract

In the middle of the third millennium BC the Sumerians must have noticed that the reciprocal of the number 7,in contrast to the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,and 6,could not be expressed by a finite sexagesimal fraction but it recurred every three places.Since the number 7 is the first natural number that has such a property, it was of particular interest to them and became the representative of their number mysticism.