turned each letter, and as [Phoenician
character] became [Greek character], our k, so [Phoenician character],
vau, became F, the Greek so-called Digamma, [Greek character], the Latin
F.

The first letter in _Chu-fu_, too, still exists in our alphabet, and in
the transverse line of our H we may recognize the last remnant of the
lines which divide the sieve. The sieve appears in Hieratic as [Egyptian
character], in Phoenician as [Phoenician character], in ancient Greek as
[Greek character], which occurs on an inscription found at Mycenae and
elsewhere as the sign of the spiritus asper, while in Latin it is known to
us as the letter H.(9) In the same manner the undulating line of our
capital L [Cursive L] still recalls very strikingly the bent back of the
crouching lion, [Egyptian character], which in the later hieroglyphic
inscriptions represents the sound of L.

If thus in our language we are Aryan, in our letters Egyptian, we have
only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonian. Why is our hour
divided into sixty minutes, our minute into sixty seconds? Would not a
division of the hour into ten, or fifty, or a hundred minutes have been
more natural? We have sixty divisions on the dials of our watches simply
because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the second century
B. C., accepted the Babylonian system of reckoning time, that system being
sexagesimal. The Babylonians knew the decimal system, but for practical
purposes they counted by _sossi_ and _sari_, the _sossos_ representing 60,
the _saros_ 60 x 60, or 3,600. From Hipparchus that system found its way
into the works of Ptolemy, about 150 A. D., and thence it was carried down
the stream of civilization, finding its last resting-place on the
dial-plates of our clocks.

And why are there twenty shillings to our sovereign? Again the real reason
lies in Babylon. The Greeks learnt from the Babylonians the art of
dividing gold and silver for the purpose of trade. It has been proved that
the current gold piece of Western Asia was exactly the sixtieth part of a
Babylonian _mna_, or _mina_. It was nearly equal to our sovereign. The
difficult problem of the relative value of gold and silver in a
bi-metallic currency had been solved to a certain extent in the ancient
Mesopotamian kingdom, the proportion between gold and silver being fixed
at 1 to 13-1/3. The silver shekel current in Babylon was heavier than the
gold shekel in the proportion of 13-1/3 to