Research

Writing

cuneiform on clay tablets, used for inventorization and accounting for temple warehouses (the government was super-centralized)
- No spaces between words or punctuation
- the tablets were palm-sized
base 60 number system
- Why: count phalanges (12) on one and curl fingers on the other (5) to count 13-60
  - Although, why do you switch counting method between fingers?
  - There's 12 lunar cycles in a year
  - It's handy to split a circle, as 60 divisible by a lot of whole numbers
- Babylonian system, leaving traces in modern-day astronomy or time-counting
- Call people “chronians” to reflect that they invented 60 second into a minute, 60 minutes into an hour
- 360 degrees in a circle – which may stem from subdividing a circle into hexagon with further subdivision into triangles
Progression from pictures into pictograms into symbols representing syllables
- Summer's syllabic system influenced a lot of the ancient world – but it was not super efficient, requiring a lot of symbols to be memorized.
- Phoenician (“phonetic”) alphabet made a step further by designating symbols for single letters. Although, they were Semitic and didn’t mark vowels – that came later, with Greeks
After Bronze Age collapse, a lot of literacy was lost.