>As I'd stated previously, 60 was chosen because it offered a wide variety of commonly-used divisors -- typically 2, 3, 4, and 5. You wouln't want to use a value that was prime, as it offers no useful divisors. Also note that it took a while before it was settled to use decimal notation. There was other really big invention -- the zero. Today it seems silly that such a thing hadn't been arrived at much earlier in history -- but the idea of having a symbol for nothing was something that took philosophers some time to come to grips with (e.g. how could something represent nothing?).

It's my understanding that "anti-primeness" was a major reason the British pound used to be 240p. It was important to be able to sub-divide cleanly when a person's yearly income might be only 20L.

That also explains the existence of coinage such as farthings ( 1/12 of a cent) - they were actually worth something back then.