section_path: History/Ancient Near East
section_name: Ancient Near East
paragraph_text: Ancient Near East
  
  Ancient Egyptian numerals were of base 10. They used hieroglyphs for the digits and were not positional. In one papyrus written around 1770 BC, a scribe recorded daily incomes and expenditures for the pharaoh 's court, using the nfr hieroglyph to indicate cases where the amount of a foodstuff received was exactly equal to the amount disbursed. Egyptologist Alan Gardiner suggested that the nfr hieroglyph was being used as a symbol for zero. The same symbol was also used to indicate the base level in drawings of tombs and pyramids, and distances were measured relative to the base line as being above or below this line.
  
  By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated base 60 positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating to as early as 700 BC), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu used three hooks as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was repurposed as a placeholder.
  
  The Babylonian positional numeral system differed from the later Hindu–Arabic system in that it did not explicitly specify the magnitude of the leading sexagesimal digit, so that for example the lone digit 1 () might represent any of 1, 60, 3600 = 60, etc., similar to the significand of a floating-point number but without an explicit exponent, and so only distinguished implicitly from context. The zero-like placeholder mark was only ever used in between digits, but never alone or at the end of a number.