Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/34

 Then his father took the brush and wet it, rubbed it on a small cake of black paint, and painted some strange figures on a piece of palm leaf. These figures did not look at all like ours, for Chang's father did not know how to write numbers as we write them, and, indeed, no one in all the world at that time knew anything whatever about them.

七百八十九 CHINESE NUMBER The number 789 in modern Chinese. The symbols mean 7 hundred 8 ten 9. The number is commonly written from the top down instead of from left to right

While Chang was learning the Chinese figures on the banks of the Yellow River, another boy was learning to write numbers in a far-distant country. This boy's name was Lugal, and his father was a merchant in Mesopotamia, not far from the place where An-am had lived so many years before.

Lugal’s father did not use a brush and a palm leaf as Chang’s father did. He took a piece of damp clay, just as you may have