What Systems of Counting Count
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme:
Crayons, Clocks, and Spelling Tests: The Human Stories Behind Everyday School Subjects
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1200 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re uncovering the hidden stories behind everyday school subjects — those lessons so common in elementary or secondary school that we may rarely stop to ask how they came to be “correct” in the first place.
Last week, we discussed the history of spelling.
Today, we’re counting.
Counting may feel neutral, natural, even universal. One, two, three.
Maybe you remember learning to count on your fingers, or with the help of fuzzy puppets and brightly colored blocks. I remember the classroom number line wrapped around the top of the chalkboard — each number stood with a kind of certainty, an unquestioned truth.
Today, we may take for granted that much of the world uses a base-10 system: grouping numbers in tens, hundreds, and thousands. But that’s just one way of organizing quantity.
Some systems — like the binary code at the core of computers — use a base-2. Others, across history and around the world, have relied on base-5, base-12, base-20, or even base-60. Some cultures used no written numerals at all.
So who decided how we count?
What happens when one system becomes “standard”?
What does counting say about culture, knowledge, power?
Do some ways of counting “count” more than others?
Inscribed in Bone, the First Counting Systems
Humans have been counting for tens of thousands of years, long before formal number systems existed.
Many ancient societies are believed to have used tally marks — notched onto bones, carved into clay tablets, knotted into strings.
Across time and place, human-made tally marks weren’t random scribbles; they were tools for recordkeeping, trade, astronomy, perhaps sacred ritual.
The oldest known artifact to represent counting is the Lebombo bone. Unearthed in a region between South Africa and Eswatini, this baboon leg bone — believed to be over 42,000 years old — has 29 distinct notches. While the purpose of this particular tally cannot be fully deciphered, some researchers believed it was used to track lunar cycles, or another time-based pattern, including menstrual cycles.
Formal Number Systems Created
In more recent history, formal number systems also developed. Some, not all examples, include:
In the 3rd millenium BCE, ancient Sumerians developed a sophisticated base-60 system. Skilled in mathematics and astronomy, the Sumerians — and later the Babylonians —used base-60 to measure time, angles, and geographic coordinates. The legacy of this system still has influence today: 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, 360 degrees in a circle — all trace back to this ancient logic.
In Ancient China, more than 2,000 years ago, mathematicians used rod numerals and counting boards to represent numbers. This place-value system allowed for sophisticated calculations and even held space for zero. Zero wasn’t a written numeral, but it was conceptually represented by a blank space on the board.
Beginning around the 5th century BCE, in Ancient Rome, numerals were used: I, V, X, L, C, M. Roman numerals use both additive and subtractive rules (e.g., 38 = XXXVIII, 4 = IV). While appearing elegant for inscriptions and documentation, they prove too cumbersome to calculate.
Between 300 BCE and 1200 CE, the Maya developed a base-20 system. Unlike the base-10 system many people use today (with 1s, 10s, 100s, etc.), the Maya counted in powers of 20: 1s, 20s, 400s, 8000s. The Maya — and likely the Olmec before them — independently developed the concept of zero, not just as a placeholder but as a number in its own right.
What all of this suggests is that there was never just one “natural” way to count.
Across time and place, humans have invented diverse systems — shaped by their environments, needs, and ways of understanding the world.
And the system most of the world uses today? Its roots lie in ancient India.
Ancient India and the How Hindu-Arabic Numerals Traveled the World
The number system much of the world uses today — 1, 2, 3, and numbers that can be skipped by tens, hundreds — may seem timeless, but it has a specific origin.
The Hindu-Arabic numeral system was developed in ancient India likely around the 3rd century BCE.
Including the critical concept of zero as a number with its own place and value, this base-10 system held positional notation, meaning the value of a number depended on where digits were located or positioned left to right (e.g. the 5 in 15 means something different than the 5 in 51). This system allowed for more complex mathematics and applications.
From India, these ideas spread through trade routes, empire-building, and the work of Arab scholars. Over time, the numerals were adopted across the Islamic world. In fact, the current digits used in the number system are believed to have come from the North African Maghreb region of the Islamic Empire.
Eventually, this number system was introduced to Europe, where it was met with skepticism, or a slower spread. By the 15th Century, however, with the rise of the printing press, as well as commerce and scientific record keeping, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system was widely adopted across Europe. Through colonialism, the Hindu-Arabic system became the dominant way of writing numbers across much of the world.
Today, these numerals are standard in most classrooms. Other number systems, however, also hold value. Bringing in the history and current-day narratives of diverse systems of knowledge can inspire curiosity, nuance, and other ways of thinking.
Different Ways of Knowing & Recording
Around the world, cultures have developed different systems rooted in the body, the landscape, and their own logic of value — many of which still persist today.
The Oksapmi People of Papua New Guinea traditionally use a body-counting system that extends across 27 body parts, from one hand to the other.
The Yupno, also of Papua New Guinea, use a spatial counting system based on the geography of the valley. The concept of time, for instance, is not viewed as something that exists linearly, but is instead conceptualized through the valley's “slope and terrain.”
The Yorùbá of Nigeria have historically used a based-20 system, with complex numerical phrasing and logic, reminiscent of the Maya in Mesoamerica but different in its notation and application.
Tools like the abacus in East Asia, or quipus in the Incan Andes are more than devices for calculation; they are memory systems, capable of recording quantities and numerical histories outside of the framework of handwritten or typed digits.
This isn’t a story of which system is superior. It’s a story of variation, adaptation, and nuance.
A story where different ways of counting — and knowing — do count.
Counting isn’t just about numbers, it’s about what we notice, what we track, what we preserve — and what we choose to teach in classrooms or pass down at home.
What we count reveals what we care about. And what we don’t count can be just as telling.
If we expand our ideas of counting, we can expand our ideas of value — and maybe even who gets to be included in the larger human story.
What Comes Next?
In a world increasingly shaped by binary logic — the 0s and 1s at the core of computing — what might a counting system look like 100 years from now?
Who will decide what “counts”?
And what might we unearth, remember, and reinvent along the way?