I know there is a slight when considering “military” time, but every one agrees that there are 24 hrs in a day. How did we all come to agreement on this fact?
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The whole point of dividing the day up into hours is so you don’t have to use fractions. So you’re going to pick a number of hours per day that’s itself easily divisible. 12 is by far the best option, being divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
Having divided the day into 12 blocks, it makes sense to divide the night into 12 blocks as well, for a total of 24. Also, once your civilization starts developing clock technology (even something as simple as hourglasses or candles), you’re going to decide that all 24 blocks should be the same length as one another.
The upshot is that Egypt, Greece, Persia, and China all ended up inventing the same hour. A few cultures did something different (e.g. India, which divided the day/night cycle into 60 *ghati* rather than 24 hours), but the 24-hour system was probably more common than all other systems combined, even before the Europeans conquered the world and exported their system to everybody else.
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