Early Counting Systems

While going over my notes regarding early counting systems, I was really amazed how many symbols it took to notate numbers in some societies. I was wondering how in the world people managed to put up with it as long as they probably did, being that so many symbols were needed to be used. As I got a little further in my notes, I came to the section regarding the reading and writing of numbers. For example, to write out in long hand 32,157, one would have to write Thirty-two thousand, one-hundred fifty-seven. That's 41 characters, including hyphens and commas. I was a little hard on the Egyptians for having notated it such as they had(I use symbol substitution) ###$$%^^^^^&&&&&&&. That's only 18 characters. Now, luckily we have our universal numeric system in place to save us the time of writing numbers out long hand, but it just struck me that if we didn't have that luxury, perhaps the Egyptian system would look mighty quick and convenient.
COOL COUNTING VIDEO -----> Egyptian couting simmilar to modern computer's computation?

                                                                             


While on the subject of ancient counting systems, I looked up Mayan counting systems. I have always been facinated by the Mayan society and have taken a lot of Cultural Anthropology classes which delt with the numeric system, but this video really gets in depth dealing with the organizing into the different placecolumns relating to the base 60 table used. It's pretty fast paced, but it's a good visual as to how Mayans counted using a physical representation of the items counted using beans and a grooved clay tablet.
MORE COOL COUNTING---->Mayan Abacus

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