Babylonian Numerals

 In the history of civilization and thought, the word Babylonian includes all those veins that have grown and grown up on the Mesopotamian basin

Of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Canadians

While they left it from texts indicating that the foundations of their civilization belonged to the Sumerians, the Egyptians inscribed on stone until they learned to make use of the papyrus that grows in abundance on the Nile basin, so they made paper from it.

As for the Sumoans, they did not have stones or papyrus, so they resorted to clay to make molds from it and write on it with a pen of fine linen. If it dried up with fire, it became bricks.

And the shapes that are written in linen on soft green clay, no matter how different their external appearance, they are composed of units such as a wedge or a nail that stands up or down or takes any position


That is why their writing was called the wedge or cuneiform writing.

The Babylonians used two symbols for numbering


   And they used to repeat the symbols to denote the required number, and the Babylonians wrote in this way the numbers from 1 to 59 and for numbers above that, they did not deal with it because they used  the sixty system.



And they used the symbol T ← 1 to denote the sixty as well, so the Babylonians used the notion of status, as the number changes its value depending on its location, for example


Perhaps it was the fractions that made the Babylonians use the sexagesimal system, in this system the half equals 30

A third equals 20, a quarter equals 15, and so on ...

  This is a distinctive feature of the sixties system, and despite the features in this system, it has shortcomings, the first of which is that it lacks a symbol to fill the empty position, which is the zero.

But the Babylonians did not create a symbol to represent the zero, but rather they left a vacuum in its place, but the copyist may forget to leave a space or he may leave a single space in a place where he must leave two spaces and so on ... .

In the late days of the Canadians, a symbol was used to indicate the vacant status. Perhaps they took the idea from the Indians, and perhaps they gave it to the Greeks or borrowed it from them.

Whatever the case, the entire Babylonian numbering soon became erased in front of the alphabetical numbering.

Among the disadvantages of the Babylonian numbering system is that the computer prepares and names numbers according to the decimal system, and then calculates them according to the sexagesimal system.

So If he wants to perform an arithmetic operation on a number, he will convert it to the decimal system and perform the operation and then convert it to the sixty-second system.

The conversion process may be more difficult than the calculation if we notice that babylonian numbering numbering houses uses the 60's system and includes a numbering of fractures but it is devoid of zero code and frequent repetition and depends on the tables for the advantages used by athletes and astronomers and to eliminate it escaped from the general public to other systems and we find the Babylonian trying to reduce repetition.

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