Counting Systems: Maya

The great pyramid at the Mayan city Chichen Itza
(it was featured in one of our favorite blog posts)

The Region: The Mayan civilization can be split up into several distinct periods: the preclassic, classic, and postclassic. During the final period, explorers from Western Europe made their first contact with the Mayan people (around 1500 CE). 

Over the 3500 years that the Mayan culture was prominent, the lands under their control remained expanded and shrank several times. They were limited to the Yucatan Penninsula (present day, a part of Mexico) but had strong ties to the Olmec and Toltec cities in surrounding Mesoamerican lands.

The Numerals: In many ways, the Mayan numeral system is more intuitive than our own. They used a Base-20, or vigesimal, system.

Counting Systems: Ancient China

Shards of the Shang Oracle Bones

In the 1890s, an archaeological dig in the Henan province of China unearthed a treasure trove. A set of bones carved with ancient text were dug up where the capital of the Shang Dynasty (1600 - 1046 BCE) was located. The oldest inscriptions that are recognized as Chinese were carved in about 1200 BCE on these ancient "Oracle Bones."

The Region: Chinese history is vast. There have been groups living in China for thousands of years, and we've discovered written records about the established dynasties on the Eastern side of the country dating as far back as 1200 BCE. The cultural center of China was naturally isolated, with mountains on the west and water to the east. This allowed Chinese numerals and mathematics to develop naturally, without much influence by other number systems, for centuries.

Counting Systems: Ancient Babylon

One of the most fascinating parts of math, for me, is the history behind it. Math is one of those things that shows up in every time period, no matter what civilization was in power or what languages were spoken. As a miniseries, I'd like to share some ancient counting systems and facts about math at that time. First up is the math of the Ancient Babylonians.

The Region: Babylonia was name of the cultural region in the fertile crescent, stretching from the Persian Gulf to modern-day Baghdad and west to the Mediterranean Sea. Their history dates back as far as 4000 BCE with the Sumerians, though very little is known about the Sumerian culture.

The Babylonian civilization rose and fell for millenia, and their culture can be classified into several distinct periods. The mathematical records that have survived come from two different periods: the First Babylonian Dynasty period (1800s - 1500s BCE) and the Selucid period (400 - 0 BCE). Very few documents fall between those two periods. The main focus of researchers are documents from the First Babylonian Dynasty, but the second period is interesting because it overlaps with great mathematicians from Ancient Greece.

One particularly famous Babylonian was Hammurabi, the king of Babylon for much of the 18th century BCE. Hammurabi's Code is the oldest known form of constitution for a government, and the stone on which it is written is the longest surviving work from the Old Babylonian period.

The Numerals: The scholars of Babylonia used cuneiform numerals to write their numbers. They pressed the wedge-shaped end of a reed into soft clay, and hardened it into stone tablets. The numbers are written from left to right like modern Latin numerals, but that is where the similarities end.