Why ten gets a bundle

Why this exists

If every amount needed its own written shape, you’d spend your life memorizing shapes. People bundled instead. Ten sticks tied together became one bundle, and you only invented symbols for what was smaller than a bundle.

Ten was a natural handful — most of us have ten fingers — but it isn’t sacred. Clocks bundle by sixty. Our written numbers happen to bundle by ten. The idea is the bundle, not the ten.