Egypt's Picture Numbers

The ancient Egyptians wrote numbers with hieroglyph symbols: a single stroke for 1, a heel-bone for 10, a coiled rope for 100, and a lotus flower for 1,000. To write a number, you simply repeated each symbol as many times as needed and added them up.

This was a real upgrade over plain tally marks — one lotus replaced a thousand strokes. But it had a hidden flaw: no place value. The position of a symbol did not change its meaning, so large calculations stayed slow and awkward, no matter how compact the writing looked.