The Numbers Before the Flood: Base 60, the Sar and the 10 Patriarchs vs 10 Kings

The Sumerian King List gives eight kings before the flood a combined reign of 241,200 years. Berossus, a Babylonian priest, gives ten kings 432,000 years. Genesis gives Methuselah 969 years of life.

These numbers look impossible. I want to know where they come from.

My question is simple. Do the huge antediluvian numbers share a base-60 origin?

Antediluvian means “before the flood”. Base 60 means counting in sixties instead of tens.

The numbers at a glance

Source	Rulers	Total	In sars
Sumerian King List, WB 444	8 kings	241,200 years	67
Sumerian list, WB 62	10 kings	236,400 years (partly restored)	65 sars and 4 ners
Berossus, Babyloniaca	10 kings	432,000 years	120
Genesis 5 (Masoretic Text)	10 patriarchs	1,656 years from Adam to the Flood	not a sar count
Vishnu Purana, Kali Yuga	one age	432,000 years	120

Base 60 and the sar

The Sumerians counted in sixties. In their system each place in a number is worth sixty times the place before it.

Our hours still work this way. An hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds.

Three units matter here. Eusebius records all three in his account of Berossus.

Unit	Value	Built as
soss	60 years	60
ner	600 years	10 × 60
sar	3,600 years	60 × 60

The ner shows that the system mixes tens and sixties. The scribes counted in steps of 10 and 6, then 10 and 6 again.

The sar is the key unit. A sar (Sumerian šar) is 3,600, the square of 60. It is the number a scribe would write as a single wedge in the third place.

The Sumerian King List: 67 sars

The Sumerian King List is a list of rulers written in cuneiform. Cuneiform is the wedge-shaped script pressed into clay.

Its best copy is the Weld-Blundell Prism, numbered WB 444, in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It dates to about 1800 BCE.

It opens with these words in the Oxford translation: “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug.”

#	King	City	Years	Sars
1	Alulim	Eridu	28,800	8
2	Alalgar	Eridu	36,000	10
3	En-men-lu-ana	Bad-tibira	43,200	12
4	En-men-gal-ana	Bad-tibira	28,800	8
5	Dumuzid, the shepherd	Bad-tibira	36,000	10
6	En-sipad-zid-ana	Larak	28,800	8
7	En-men-dur-ana	Sippar	21,000	5 sars and 5 ners
8	Ubara-Tutu	Shuruppak	18,600	5 sars and 1 ner
	Total	5 cities	241,200	67

Then the prism says: “Then the flood swept over.”

Six of the eight reigns are whole sars. The last two break into sars and ners. Every reign is a round number in base 60.

That tells me the numbers were built in the scribe’s own counting system. They were not observed years written down one by one.

A second tablet, WB 62, lists ten kings. It ends with Ziusudra of Shuruppak, the survivor in the Sumerian flood story.

In A. R. George’s 2011 edition, the WB 62 total reads 236,400 years. Part of that figure is restored, because the tablet is damaged there.

So the number of kings changes between copies. The sar does not.

Berossus: 120 sars

Berossus was a priest of Bel-Marduk in Babylon. He wrote his Babyloniaca in Greek around 290 to 278 BCE.

The book is lost. Its king list survives through Alexander Polyhistor and Abydenus, who were copied by Eusebius and George Syncellus.

#	King (Greek form)	Sars	Years
1	Aloros	10	36,000
2	Alaparos	3	10,800
3	Amelon	13	46,800
4	Ammenon	12	43,200
5	Megalaros	18	64,800
6	Daonos	10	36,000
7	Euedorachos	18	64,800
8	Amempsinos	10	36,000
9	Otiartes (also Opartes)	8	28,800
10	Xisuthros	18	64,800
	Total	120	432,000

Berossus counts every reign in whole sars. His total is 120 sars.

In base 60, 120 is two full sixties. So 432,000 is 2 × 60 × 60 × 60. A scribe would write it as a 2 followed by three empty places.

That is the cleanest number in the whole set. I read it as a designed total, not a sum that happened to come out round.

In the reign of Xisuthros the flood came. Berossus has him warned in a dream and told to build a ship.

Berossus also says fish-like beings came out of the sea in these reigns. The first was Oannes, who taught writing and the arts. I read these Apkallu sages as teachers who came from outside.

Genesis: lifespans, not reigns

Genesis 5 lists ten men from Adam to Noah. For each it gives his age when his heir was born, his years after that, and his full lifespan.

The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew text. In it, 1,656 years pass from the creation of Adam to the Flood.

That 1,656 is a chain of fathers’ ages at the birth of each heir. Noah’s 600 years at the Flood close it (Genesis 7:6).

The lifespans are a separate sum. The ten men lived 8,575 years between them.

The older versions of Genesis disagree on several numbers. The Septuagint is the Greek translation made in Egypt in the last centuries BCE. The Samaritan Pentateuch is the version kept by the Samaritan community.

Patriarch	Masoretic	Septuagint	Samaritan
Adam	930	930	930
Seth	912	912	912
Enosh	905	905	905
Kenan	910	910	910
Mahalalel	895	895	895
Jared	962	962	847
Enoch	365	365	365
Methuselah	969	969	720
Lamech	777	753	653
Noah	950	950	950
Years from Adam to the Flood	1,656	2,242	1,307

None of these numbers is a sar count. They are in the hundreds, and most are not round.

Enoch is the exception that stands out. His 365 years match the days of a solar year, and Genesis 5:24 says he was taken, not that he died.

Testing the conversion claim

A claim circulates online that the Genesis ages are the Sumerian reigns, rewritten from base 60 into base 10. I wanted to test it with the real figures.

The claim usually takes the eight middle patriarchs, Seth to Lamech. Their Masoretic lifespans add up to 6,695 years.

Step	Figure
Seth to Lamech, Masoretic lifespans	6,695
Same eight ages rounded to two digits	6,710
Figure the online claim starts from	6,660
WB 444 total	241,200 (67 sars)

The first problem is the rounding. Rounding the eight ages gives 6,710, not 6,660.

The second problem is the place values. None of the eight ages reaches 1,000, so there is no thousands digit to reread as a sar.

The step from 6,660 to 241,200 only works if you choose the place values by hand. It shows that the two totals can be made to meet. It does not show that a scribe converted one into the other.

The idea itself has a serious history. John Walton (1981) compared the antediluvian section of the Sumerian King List with Genesis 5 and looked at how the numbers could relate.

Carol Hill (2003) argued that the Genesis numbers are partly sacred or symbolic numbers. In her reading they carry meaning in a Mesopotamian number system, not plain years.

My result is narrow. The popular version of the conversion fails on its own figures. The wider question, whether Genesis drew on Mesopotamian number habits, is still open.

The 432,000 echo

India: the Kali Yuga

The Vishnu Purana divides time into four ages, or yugas. A yuga is a world age.

The Kali Yuga, our present age, lasts 1,200 divine years. One divine year is 360 human years.

So the Kali Yuga lasts 1,200 × 360 = 432,000 human years. That is the same total as Berossus.

The four ages together form a Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years. That is ten times the Kali Yuga.

The link to base 60 here is real but indirect. The Indian count runs through 360, the ideal year of 360 days, not through the sar.

Both 360 and 3,600 are built from 6 and 60. So 432,000 can be reached either as 120 × 3,600 or as 1,200 × 360. I count the shared total as a strong echo. I cannot show who took it from whom.

The Puranas also tell of Manu, the progenitor of humanity. The Vishnu Purana counts fourteen Manus in one day of Brahma. The present one, Vaivasvata, the seventh, survives the flood with the help of Matsya, the fish form of Vishnu.

A fish that saves the survivor of the flood. Berossus has fish-sages who teach before the flood. I note the pairing and leave it there.

Egypt: the Turin King List

The Turin King List is a papyrus from the reign of Ramesses II, around 1250 BCE. Before Menes, the first king, it lists gods and spirits.

Its damaged summary lines give 13,420 years for “the spirits and the Followers of Horus”. They give 23,200 years for the reigns before them.

Graham Hancock adds the two to 36,620 years in Fingerprints of the Gods. Both figures may be missing digits, because the papyrus is broken.

Neither figure is a multiple of 60. I see no base-60 structure in the Turin totals.

Egypt: Manetho and the Old Chronicle

Manetho was an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek around 280 BCE. His version survives through Eusebius.

According to Eusebius, Manetho gave 13,900 years to the rule of the gods. Gods, demigods and spirits of the dead together came to 24,925 years.

Eusebius read these as lunar “years” of about 30 days. That was his way of shrinking them, not Manetho’s.

These figures are not base 60 either. They do not divide cleanly by 60 or 360.

Syncellus quotes an “Old Chronicle” that covers 30 dynasties in 36,525 years. That is 25 × 1,461.

A Sothic cycle is 1,461 Egyptian years. It is the time the 365-day calendar takes to drift back into line with the rising of the star Sirius.

So the Old Chronicle total is built on the solar year of 365 and a quarter days. It is a calendar construction, not a sexagesimal one.

Figure	Source	Base 60?
241,200	WB 444	Yes: 67 sars
432,000	Berossus	Yes: 120 sars
432,000	Kali Yuga	Through 360: 1,200 × 360
4,320,000	Mahayuga	Through 360 and 10
13,420 + 23,200	Turin King List	No, and damaged
13,900 / 24,925	Manetho via Eusebius	No
36,525	Old Chronicle	No: 25 Sothic cycles of 1,461

The paleo-contact answer

Sitchin: the sar as an orbit

Zecharia Sitchin argued in The 12th Planet (1976) that the sar of 3,600 years is the orbit of a planet he called Nibiru. In his reading, the Anunnaki came to Earth each time Nibiru came close.

On that view the king list is not inflated at all. Each sar is one orbit, and each reign counts orbits.

My own model: time dilation

What follows is my own speculative model. It is not found in the tablets or in Sitchin.

Suppose the Genesis ages are time as the travellers lived it. Suppose the Sumerian reigns are time as it passed on Earth.

The ratio of a sar to a century is 3,600 to 100, which is 36. Multiply the 6,695 years of Seth to Lamech by 36 and you get 241,020.

That is within 180 years of the WB 444 total of 241,200.

In physics, a clock that moves close to light speed runs slow. The slowing factor is called the Lorentz factor.

A Lorentz factor of 36 needs a speed of about 0.9996 times the speed of light. At that factor, a 3,600-year orbit would last 100 years for those on board.

The single kings do not fit as well. Enosh’s 905 years times 36 give 32,580, while his proposed match, Amelon, reigned 46,800.

I keep the model because the totals land so close. I do not claim it as proof.

Biglino: the Elohim as real beings

Mauro Biglino translated Hebrew texts for an Italian Catholic publisher, Edizioni San Paolo. In Gods of the Bible he argues that Elohim should not be read as “God”.

In his reading the Elohim were a group of physical, powerful beings, and Yahweh was one of them. Read that way, Genesis records long-lived rulers, not a myth about a single God.

That fits the Mesopotamian lists. Kings whose “kingship descended from heaven” become, in Genesis, ancestors with very long lives.

OAHSPE

OAHSPE is a channelled book published by John Ballou Newbrough in 1882. Its contents list includes this heading:

Part 2: Creation and truer version of “Adam and Eve”

Newbrough’s book describes cycles of time in its own terms. Six cycles of 72,000 years make 432,000. And 72,000 divided by 20 gives 3,600, one sar.

Matching names across the lists

Scholars have tried to match names between Genesis and the Mesopotamian lists. These are proposals, not proven equations.

Genesis	Mesopotamian figure	Proposed link
Enosh (“man”)	Amelon, from Akkadian amelu (“man”)	both names mean “man”
Enoch (7th)	En-men-dur-ana (7th), king of Sippar	both seventh; both taught heavenly secrets
Noah	Ziusudra / Xisuthros	flood survivor

The Enoch link is the strongest for me. In a later Babylonian text studied by W. G. Lambert (1967), Enmeduranki of Sippar receives the secrets of heaven and earth from Shamash, the sun god.

Enoch is also seventh. He lives 365 years, one for each day of the solar year, and is taken up by God.

A note on Plato

Plato’s Critias also gives ten kings, the five pairs of twins of Atlantis. But Plato gives them no reign lengths, and 432,000 does not appear in his account.

His one large number is 9,000 years since the war with Atlantis (Critias 108e). Counted from Solon’s visit to Egypt, that points to about 9600 BCE. It is a count in tens, with no trace of the sar.

Chinese tradition likewise remembers eight sage rulers before the first dynasty, with no sar-like totals.

What the numbers show

The Sumerian and Babylonian totals are built in base 60. Every reign is a round number of sars or ners. That is the strongest finding here.

The Kali Yuga reaches the same 432,000 through 360. That shared total is a real echo across cultures.

The Egyptian totals do not follow base 60. The Old Chronicle is built on Sirius and the 365-day year.

The Genesis ages are not converted sars. The popular conversion fails on its own figures, even though the idea of a shared number heritage is still open.

What remains is a set of numbers too large to be ordinary years, designed with care, in a counting system that started in Sumer. Whether they count orbits, lived time on a journey, or sacred cycles is the question I keep following on this site.

Related:

• /utnapishtim-ziusudra-and-noah
• /the-12-elohim
• /the-nephilim
• /maps-of-atlantis
• /timelines

Sources

Primary texts

• Genesis 5 and 7:6, Masoretic Text: https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.5
• Genesis 5, MT/LXX/SP comparison: https://creation.com/en/articles/biblical-chronogenealogies and https://intertextual.bible/text/genesis-5.26/lxx-genesis-5.26
• Berossus via Eusebius, Chronicle (Armenian), king and sar table, soss/ner/sar: https://www.attalus.org/translate/eusebius4.html
• Berossus via Syncellus and Eusebius (Cory, Ancient Fragments): https://sacred-texts.com/cla/af/af03.htm
• Sumerian King List, ETCSL 2.1.1 (WB 444): https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr211.htm
• WB 62, total 236,400 (restored): A. R. George, CUSAS 17 (2011), King Lists chapter: https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/451868
• Ziusudra in WB 62: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziusudra
• Plato, Critias, tr. Benjamin Jowett: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1571/1571-h/1571-h.htm
• Turin King List (13,420 and 23,200): https://pharaoh.se/kinglists/turin/columns/3/
• Manetho Fr. 1 (Eusebius, Armenian), Waddell’s Loeb translation: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Manetho/History_of_Egypt/1*.html
• Manetho, Waddell (Loeb 1940), incl. Old Chronicle 36,525: https://archive.org/stream/manethowithengli00maneuoft/manethowithengli00maneuoft_djvu.txt
• Eusebius on Manetho (13,900; lunar years): https://www.attalus.org/translate/eusebius1.html
• Vishnu Purana 1.3 (yugas, 432,000, fourteen Manus), tr. H. H. Wilson: https://sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp037.htm
• Vishnu Purana 3.1 and 3.2 (Vaivasvata seventh): https://sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp075.htm and https://sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp076.htm
• J. B. Newbrough, OAHSPE (1882)

Secondary

• G. Verbrugghe and J. Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho (1996): https://www.press.umich.edu/14102/berossos_and_manetho_introduced_and_translated
• W. G. Lambert, “Enmeduranki and Related Matters”, JCS 21 (1967)
• J. Walton, “The Antediluvian Section of the Sumerian King List and Genesis 5”, Biblical Archaeologist 44 (1981)
• C. A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers of Genesis”, PSCF 55 (2003)
• G. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (1995)
• Z. Sitchin, The 12th Planet (1976)
• M. Biglino, Gods of the Bible: https://www.maurobiglino.com/en/gods-of-the-bible-mauro-biglino/