The Day Before · Sprout · ages 6-8
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Read by an AI-generated voice. The words on this page are the transcript.
The Mark for Nothing
The hammer rang once. A spark jumped off the anvil and did not go out. It waited. They followed.
Warm wind blew the Green away, and the ground under their feet was somewhere else, the day before.
A cool room full of sacks. A boy with a clay tablet.
"Two hundred and five sacks," he said. "Two hundreds, no tens, five ones. I must write it down."
"I know what that means! You need a..." said Lan. Bzzz.
You can't bring the answer. You can only bring the question.
He wrote two, a little gap, then five. "Twenty-five?" said a scribe. "That's not many."
He made the gap wider. But the copy squeezed it shut. Twenty-five again!
"What is in the middle place?" said Inkling. "Nothing. But you can't see a nothing. A gap can shrink."
"Could there be a mark that means none?" said Lan.
The boy pressed two slanted wedges into the middle place. Two, the mark for none, five.
The scribe copied it. The mark stayed. "Two hundred and five!"
In the morning, two hundred and five sacks went to the bakers.
Warm wind blew the day before away, and the grass under their feet was the Green.
Under DOOR was a new letter. N. The word said OPEN!
The spark dimmed to a warm dot and settled back on the anvil. The Green was just the Green again.
Back on the Green
Lan wrote her house number, 106, on a card. She did not forget the 0.
Tell the story back to someone. Why did the boy need a mark for nothing?
Who you met
-
Lan a child of the Green Goes first; makes a friend in a minute -
Inkling a child of the Green Names what she notices
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts are true, stretched or made up — and what does nobody know?
True
- In Babylon, in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), scribes wrote numbers by pressing a reed into soft clay. By about 300 BC they had started using a mark of two slanted wedges to show an empty place in a number. Source
- That Babylonian mark held a place, but it was not yet thought of as a number of its own, and it was not written at the end of a number. The Maya, far away in Central America, had their own sign for zero, shaped like a shell. Source
- Two hundreds, no tens and five ones make two hundred and five. Without a mark in the empty tens place, the same marks can be read as twenty-five.
Stretched
- In the story the boy counts in hundreds, tens and ones. What we simplified: The Babylonians counted in sixties, not tens: their places stood for ones, sixties and sixty sixties. The idea of an empty place works the same way.
Made up
- Lan and Inkling, the spark, the buzzing word, the boy, his teacher, the steward and the two hundred and five sacks are made up.
Nobody knows
- Nobody knows who first pressed a mark for an empty place into clay, or who first thought of nothing as a number. It seems to have been worked out more than once, by different people, in different places. Source