I was actually talking about this the other day with the Fiancee. I speculated that one reason the West advanced more quickly was the efficiency of the written language. Like you look at the Chinese >"And see, this symbol is a forest and there's a little cabin off to the side, with a bear shitting in the woods to the right of it" >"Oh cool. What does that mean?" >"4" For example, one thing a lot of people don't realize is the numeral system is different from country to country, not just "0, 1, 2". Here are some of the historical Chinese numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Historical_use_of_numerals_in_China Imagine trying to do business by hand with these. All of the Western numbers are one stroke. Simple [Here's a number chart similar to OP's](https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/2172211/thumbnail/entry_id/1_re83iy5w/def_height/500/def_width/500/) (but not exhaustive). Even Roman Numerals were probably more efficient at the time, enough to deal with smaller numbers anyways (which was sufficient for the vast majority of use cases).