this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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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 ๐น symbols, a space then a single ๐น ? Was it easy to tell the difference between say 21 and 3?
61 would be ๐น ๐น. Essentially the same way we write 11. It can be compared to ๐น๐น 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 ๐๐๐น, and for 3 it's ๐น๐น๐น.
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 ๐น / ๐น for 61 vs ๐น ๐น 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.