Cuneiform Numbers

June's visit with Dr. N went fine. There were some test results of several months ago that we had never received word on, and they were all okay. Dr. N and I had a brief exchange concerning Ahmadiyya Islam. He's one of the people that I think of whenever evangelicals engage in what I consider to be "bridge-burning" actions with regard to Muslims. Trust is very, very hard to earn and can be lost all-too-quickly.

Today is the 13th. 13 is supposedly an unlucky number, which is allegedly derived from the Babylonian system of numbers. I know that this is conventional wisdom, but I'm just a little skeptical. The Babylonian number system was based on the number 60. Depending on its position, a single downstroke could mean either mean 1, 60, or 3,600, as the picture shows. So, everything from 1 to 59 goes into the first box, everything from 60 to 3,599 into the second one, and so forth.

So, how would you write the number 13? This is where it gets funny because there is a special symbol for 10; consequently there must be some kind of decimal hunch underlying the otherwise sexagesimal system. The depiction for 10 reminds me of an angel fish. If you've ever had an aquarium, you may have had one of them swallow up all your neons.

So, if you want to write 13, you write the symbol for 10, link three 1's together, and combine them.

However, you must be sure to keep all your symbols in the far right box. Otherwise, you get the wrong number. Just by itself, the sign could mean either 13 or 780 or something even higher, so it needs to be in the right position. Location is everything.

There's only one problem. To the best of my knowledge, when the Babylonians scratched with their styli into the wax tablets or cylinders, they didn't have any boxes. So, then, how did they indicate position for their numerals? They invented a placeholder sign, which eventually took the place of our zero. It looked a little like a slanted π. And thus, the happy outcome was that it was now possible to avoid having your calculations accidentally be off by 767.

None of which says anything about why 13 should be an unlucky number. In Chinese culture, the number 8 is considered to be lucky because its pronunciation is a lot like the word for "good fortune," and number 4 has the misfortune of sounding somewhat like "misfortune." I know of no such explanation for 13 in Babylonian, though my Akkadian is extremely weak. Still, I had fun learning about Babylonian numerals, and I hope you did, too.