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An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.

Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.



It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills


Imagine if the first archeological discovery they made was tax forms from different countries. What would they think of us, haha.


They hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.


Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.


I noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".


I think it comes up in the Gospels, too, e.g. "on the third day" after the resurrection.


“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)


In Biblical Hebrew, "Kulo" means "All of it (with the kollel)". The kollel is an extra 1 added to a sum of numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria#Other_methods


ku-ro obviously means "carry in" :)


My French teacher told me a story of a Norwegian man who married a French woman. A few months after she'd moved to Norway, my French teacher had come to visit thrm.

When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?

Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.

It means (carrier) bag.




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