The discovery at the end of the 19^th century of the mathematical cuneiform texts posed to historians the question of the nature of the numbers used in them, i.e. that of the sexagesimal place-value notation. This notation, although familiar to us today since it is the one we use to measure time, has, in the cuneiform texts, specificities which still raise challenges of interpretation. One of these specificities is the fact that the cuneiform writing does not indicate the order of magnitude of the numbers (for example, 1, 60, 1/60 or any other power of 60 are written in the same way). This article outlines the way in which historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries interpreted this specificity. The focus here is on the interpretation proposed by the Assyriologist François Thureau-Dangin, who in 1930 considered numbers in sexagesimal place-value notation as “abstract numbers”, as opposed to “concrete numbers”.

19 世纪末的^发现一个世纪的楔形文字数学文本向历史学家提出了其中使用的数字的性质问题，即六十进制位值表示法的问题。这种表示法虽然今天我们很熟悉，因为它是我们用来测量时间的一种，但在楔形文字文本中，它的特殊性仍然对解释提出了挑战。这些特殊性之一是楔形文字不指示数字的数量级（例如，1、60、1/60 或任何其他 60 的幂都以相同的方式书写）。本文概述了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初的历史学家解释这种特殊性的方式。这里的重点是亚述学家 François Thureau-Dangin 提出的解释，