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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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)

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago

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

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Base-12 is absolutely gorgeous for geometry. A metric system on base-12? <chef's kiss>

[–] SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

Duodecimal is my favorite.

[–] GeorgimusPrime@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago

Dodecic system

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've said it at least ν times, the Greeks had the weirdest system.

[–] GarboDog@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

We’ve said it times, our family will use a proper Aztec numbers just like our forefathers