this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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I refuse arabic numbers. What the fuck is 2? 7? 9??? These are all made up concepts invented to corrupt the mind of people.
Look at how elegant these look instead: 10, 111, 1001.
I dont care if i have to say it X times, roman numerals are superior
If I've said it once I've said it 𒁹𒌋𒌋𒌋𒌋 times, the babylonians got it right
Base 12 ftw.
It's base 60 actually. With up to 5 𒌋 meaning 10 followed by up to 9 𒁹 meaning one. I actually should have put a space between the 60s place and the 1s place and formatted it as: 𒁹 𒌋𒌋𒌋𒌋
It's a lot easier to read in clay because you bunch the characters up within their place, and if it were used in modern day it would likely be autocorrected to make it easier
Base 60 does make dividing evenly into 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, etc. really easy.
If I were raised in China or something and used to memorizing / recognizing dozens or hundreds of symbols, then having individual symbols for the numbers 0 to 59 might be nice. But, as someone who only learned a 26 letter alphabet and 10 digits I like base 10 because it's quick to parse a number.
How did the Babylonians write 61? 6 𒁹 symbols, a space then a single 𒁹 ? Was it easy to tell the difference between say 21 and 3?
61 would be 𒁹 𒁹. Essentially the same way we write 11. It can be compared to 𒁹𒁹 meaning 2, which would appear bunched up as opposed to separated. Plenty of room for very large errors and I suspect if it'd stuck around you'd probably see something like a distinct 1, 9, 10, and 50 tallies to indicate "hey this is where this place begins" as well as a zero. For 21 it would be 𒌋𒌋𒁹, and for 3 it's 𒁹𒁹𒁹.
Cuneiform is a writing system highly constrained by its medium. It's just pressing triangular reeds into clay. Any shape you can't get out of that isn't in the writing system. Using conjoined tallies makes sense for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals
It seems to me that with a reed you could also underline something or draw a slash between items, so you could do 𒁹 / 𒁹 for 61 vs 𒁹 𒁹 for 2.
If anything I would use the slash for zero. Maybe a dot in the middle for place differentiation, though that could make a slash irrelevant.
Ultimately Babylon was really really good at logistics and administration, and they did a great job with stuff like tracking the sky. But it was a very early civilization. It's easy for us to give notes 4000 years later, but our modern mathematical notation is a product of international collaboration over a millennium by different civilizations that all produced great mathematicians. When we compare them to their contemporaries we can see that they were surprisingly forward thinking, being the only ones using place value in their geographical and temporal region.
yeah, seeing the symbols spread out across multiple characters makes it hard to tell whether that's 100 or something else (considering i learned counting in cuneiform just this moment)
Yeah, but you have to give it credit, it's really easy to pick up as far as number systems go. Definitely less useful for math and science than modern European-Arabic numerals, but much better for logistics and administration than say roman numerals
Base-12 is absolutely gorgeous for geometry. A metric system on base-12? <chef's kiss>
Duodecimal is my favorite.
Dodecic system
I've said it at least ν times, the Greeks had the weirdest system.
We’ve said it
times, our family will use a proper Aztec numbers just like our forefathers
IV/V Romans agree...
Perfect V/VII
Yes but how is it with rice?
Only if it's garnished with silphium.
They are letters tho.
I is a finger. V is the line down your thumb and up the fingers (a whole hand). X is both your hands crossed… that’s one theory as to why they used “letters” for numbers.
Why use many digits when few digits do trick?
they have played us for absolute fools
This is the way. Embrace binary numbers. Reject everything that is nonbinary.
Nah, we're keeping the NBs.