I thought about this question recently when reading about early japan history. Their writting system and the chinese one are well know, but what about the numbers? Surely an empire so fond of administration such as China would have invented one.

I'm particularly curious about these ones because on the other hand they did retain their writting characters to this day, but the question apply to as much civilisations as you can answers, I find it very interesting what early isolated humans thought of writting past the "adding sticks" phase. All the better if we have pictures of it.

Also, were the indians the only ones to invent the zéro? How did it went?

Finally, I vaguely remember hearing that one of the precolombians civilisations had a twenty based system rather than the ten based one we're accustomed to. Were there others différents systems?