[Infrastructure] After being mistaken for a god

The sun went down and night fell.A bright golden star hangs in the clear western sky, no other star can compete with it.

Dan stands on a hillside, facing west.The night wind brushed his short golden-brown hair, but it couldn't stop him from staring intently at this beautiful star.

"Venus...it's so beautiful." Dan looked back at Yi Nan, probably secretly comparing in his heart.

Yi Nan was sitting on the ground behind Dan, checking Dan's calculations by the nearby bonfire.Her mood was not as beautiful as Dan's. She discovered that the decimal numbering system created by Dan was not decimal, twelve binary, or twenty decimal, but... sexagesimal!

Yinan held his chin vigorously, thinking depressedly: Why, why is it sexagesimal? ①

On the ground made of clay bricks in front of her, there is a large number of counting chips neatly placed - some counting chips are made of dried reed sticks on the banks of the Euphrates River, and Yi Nan calls them "reed chips" .

In addition to counting chips, there are also pottery chips, a by-product of firing pottery one by one.In fact, they are broken pottery, but Dan polished them to be of similar size and shape, and the edges and corners were removed without cutting hands, so they were used for calculation.

According to what Dan said, sixty reed chips are represented by one pottery chip.

But in fact, the word "sixty" mentioned by Dan fell into Yinan's ears, and it has already been translated by the language chip.In Dan's mind, there is absolutely no concept of "six" and "ten" in the word "sixty". "Sixty" is just a single definition noun.

This was quite unacceptable to Yi Nan, who was used to the decimal system.

But if you think about it carefully, the sexagesimal system has also greatly affected human life: from seconds to hours to minutes, sexagesimal systems are used.

Yi Nan didn't have to worry about it. Anyway, in the future, the society will digitize data, whether you use decimal or sexagesimal, it will be unified by binary in the end.

But she was still curious: Why did the ancient Mesopotamian civilization finally choose sexagesimal?

"Why did you choose one pottery chip to represent sixty reed chips?" Yinan simply asked Dan.

Dan ran to Yinan and sat cross-legged, grabbed a handful of reed chips and sat down, counting exactly sixty.

He said: "Such a handful of reed chips, if I want two land pieces, I can get them all."

"Three lands and three lands can be divided as much as possible."

"Five lands for five lands, you can get all of them."

Yi Nan asked again: "Then thirty is also okay?" Why didn't Dan create the thirty system?

Dan cunningly took out another handful of reeds: "Then if you want twelve lands, thirty won't work, only sixty can do it!"

Yi Nan was speechless: It seems that the child in front of him is really smart.

He just mentioned that sixty is divisible by two, three, and five, which already involves the concepts of divisibility, fractions, and prime numbers.As for sixty being divisible by twelve, it is probably because twelve itself is also a very important number:

For example, the moon revolves around the earth twelve times in a year; another example, if the thumb does not participate in counting, then there are twelve knuckles on one hand that can be used to assist in counting...

"My god, didn't you say that you want Dan to see the stars clearly and write them down?"

At this time, Dan simply lay flat on the ceramic tile floor, looked at the night sky gradually turning dark blue, and said: "At first I watched it for several nights, but I couldn't remember the stars in the sky. If I look at it two days later, I won’t recognize it again…”

Yinan thought: Stargazing is indeed like this. If there is no auxiliary division, it is really difficult to remember only by the shapes of various constellations.

Unexpectedly, Dan said at the next moment: "Later, I thought, if I divided the sky into several pieces according to the rules, and then recorded the stars that appeared in each piece of sky, wouldn't it be much easier than it is now?"

Yi Nan: ...What do you want me to praise you for?

Ancient civilizations all have a tradition of stargazing, and stargazing naturally has to be divided into divisions.In the ancient East, the sky was divided into 28 regions for observation, while the zodiac signs in the West originated from the astronomical observations of the Mesopotamian civilization.

Yi Nan suddenly felt that Dan had the potential to be a scientific research madman—she couldn't help shivering at the thought of this.

"Looking at this piece of sky, I was thinking about how to equalize it. I thought about two points, three points, five points, six points, and twelve points...so I thought of using a pottery chip to represent so many points. Luchou. Although our tribe has not raised a sheep with Taochou..."

The Sumerian tribe now has more than 40 sheep. If the brave and the villagers work harder, they will be able to fill up a pottery chip...

Yinan thought: now that various counting materials are relatively scarce, the sexagesimal system can indeed represent larger numbers more easily than the decimal system.

Now that Dan has figured out the system, she will be an observer for the time being, and see how the sexagesimal numbers develop into mathematics later.

Just as he was thinking, Dan's cat let out a loud "meow" and came to Yi Nan with a fat vole in its mouth.

Recently, a barn has been built on the hillside, attracting a lot of voles, and cats show their talents.

And this meow has a characteristic, as long as Yi Nan is around, it will bring its prey and give it to Yi Nan.

Yi Nan: ...Is this my reward for petting the cat?

She had to scratch the cat's little head as a "reward", and then the cat was willing to shake away and enjoy its prey by itself.

"Dan, have you figured out when the rainy season will come?" Yinan asked the boy.

Dan scratched his head and said, "According to my calculations, the rainy season should have come by now..."

Yi Nan looked at the positions of the stars in the sky, and felt a little strange in his heart.It should be winter now.According to her calculation, the rainy season should have come.

Abnormality is a demon——Yinan had some ominous premonition inexplicably.

In the next period of time, the weather was uncharacteristically, instead of entering the rainy season, it became cold and dry.The tribe planted the wheat, but Yinan seemed to foresee that the wheat might not be harvested, and kept urging the whole tribe to find ways to store grain.

The rations of the entire tribe were moved to the barn on the mountain, and people (and cats) were arranged to be on duty.

When prey is abundant, the excess meat is salted with rock salt and hung up to dry.

All kinds of plant seeds were collected by Yi Nan in a special clay pot, which also contained salt crystals wrapped in linen cloth to absorb moisture.

All brave men and villagers were mobilized to take part in the construction of houses on the hillside.In addition to barns, dwelling houses and sheds for cattle were built rapidly.

Everyone knew that Yinan wanted to move the entire tribe to Mid-Mountain before the end of winter—but why?Is it necessary to be in such a hurry?

Inan has her own reasons: the water of the Euphrates comes from the mountains and plateaus in the northwest.The high water level of the river every year when the rainy season turns to dry season is actually the abundant water brought by the snowmelt of the upper mountains.

But the current climate looks very abnormal.The south is dry and rainless, which may indicate that the precipitation is concentrated in the mountains in the northwest. The low temperature means that there is a lot of snow in the mountains, so next year when the snow melts, the amount of water will be greater than in previous years.

According to Yinan's judgment, the Euphrates River will flood to a certain extent at the turn of winter and spring next year.

It’s just that when Yi Nan told the people of the Sumerian tribe, the villagers could only listen to it as if they were listening to an oracle, and there was no way to verify it.

If there is no flood at that time, Yinan's status and reputation as a "god" will definitely be greatly discounted.

But Yinan would rather there be no flood in her heart than she would "break faith" with the entire tribe—after all, with the current level of development of the Sumerians, the ability to resist natural disasters is too weak.

In spring, when the temperature rises and the weather gets warmer, there is still little rain.

However, the Sumerians still managed to irrigate the wheat fields with the sufficient water from the Euphrates River.When the weather gets warmer and summer is about to enter, the harvest of this season's wheat will be imminent.

On this day, Ku led the entire Sumerian tribe to start harvesting the season's wheat.The brave men used sharp stone blades and wooden sticks to make sickles for harvesting, and the harvest was fast and good.

Others piled the wheat in the open to dry, intending to take it back to the barn after drying.

At this moment, I suddenly heard a muffled rumbling sound in the distance, like the muffled thunder rolling in the sky before the rainstorm.

Ku raised his head vigilantly, and after listening quietly for a while, he suddenly turned his head and shouted: "Quick, run! Run to a higher place and go back to the village!"

With just one sentence, the water of the Euphrates River suddenly rose to the feet of the crowd.

"Braves, carry as much wheat as you can before leaving. Others, don't worry about anything, just run to the village!" Ku ordered loudly.

Although the brave men were entrusted with the task of rescuing the wheat, in fact, Ku knew it in his own mind, relying on them... what they could get back was really limited.

But, I can't bear it!The hard-grown wheat.

By the time each brave man had carried a bundle of wheat, the water had already overflowed the wheat field.Other residents in the tribe have already rushed up the mountain.Dan has been at the entrance of the village to count the number of people who have returned safely.

When Ku and the brave men under his command rushed back to the new station in the middle of the mountain, the place where they had lived and the land they had cultivated was already a vast ocean.

The flood is still rising rapidly, gradually approaching the village's resident.

Ku was the last to return to the village.Looking at the approaching flood behind him, he was really afraid: If they still lived at the foot of the mountain, what they encountered today would be the disaster of destroying their homes.

However, seeing that the water level of the flood is getting higher and higher, no one is sure that the flood will not just spread up the hillside and further erode their homes.

And... Can the tribe trapped on this hillside really survive this difficult period together?

Thinking of this, Ku's footsteps hesitated a bit.But after thinking about it, their tribe has the goddess Inan who predicted the flood sitting in town, so what are they afraid of?Ku immediately hugged Maizi in his arms and rushed straight into the village.

The author has something to say: ① As a student studying the history of Western Asia, Yinan should know that the Sumerians created the sexagesimal system—but this is not a bug.Because there is also another theory that the Sumerians created the decimal system in the early days, and then the sexagesimal system.After all, when early humans had less population and material needs, they were more likely to choose the decimal system.So, Yinan, curiously probed.

I would like to thank the little angels who irrigated this article with nutrient solution recently: Liangzai, Frola, Florence Nightingale, Andromeda, fallendown, Yiyi, Xixi, thank you everyone, the author will work hard.