AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF SCIENTIFIC STUDIES PROVE DEFINITIVELY THAT RIGHT WING BELIEFS ARE HEAVILY CORRELATED WITH LOW INTELLIGENCE:
Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact
Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice
Study links low intelligence with right-wing beliefs
Right-wing ideology and numeracy: A perception of greater ability, but poorer performance
Conservatism and cognitive ability
Intelligent people are more likely to be left-wing, says science
People with lower emotional intelligence are more likely to hold right-wing views, study finds
(Taken from pinned comment here)
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.
It would be so interesting to be able to travel back in time to see how they did things. I bet there’s a lot of lost knowledge because something ceased being necessary to know.