Similar in some ways, yes, but slightly different in others. Most ancient societies (especially the Egyptians and Sumerians and others) divided used a unit of time equal to 1/12 of a daylight period or 1/24 of a full solar day. Why units of 12? Scholars believe that this was due to the lunar cycles, which divide the year into 12 months, so 12 was a consistent number to subdivide by.
Early variations of a definition of this unit of time (I will call it an hour since that is our unit that it would be most similar to) varied between one of three typical definitions:
1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset
1/24 of the time of an apparent solar day (between one noon and the next, or one sunset and the next)
1/24 of the mean solar day (slightly different and less accurate over a long period of time.
Apparently, in ancient China (which I do not have any experience with, but I came across this in researching this answer, someone flaired in ancient Chinese history may correct me on this) they divided the whole day into twelve parts, so the "hour" would have been technically two of our hours long.
When referring to time, we know that in the first century or two (at least in the Near East and Rome), they referred to a certain time of day as "the xth hour" (and the moment they are counting from may be different depending on which cultural system they are using as a reference point). In the Bible, Mark tells us that Jesus was crucified "at the sixth hour", which most scholars understand as referring to the number of hours from sunrise (which would have been from 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM).
John L. McKenzie, “Dictionary of the Bible”, Touchstone, 1965, p 375
Holford-Strevens, Leofranc (2005). The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions 133. Oxford: Oxford University Press
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Apparent_solar_time
Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum (1996). History of the hour: clocks and modern temporal orders.