Akkad was the land to the northwest of Sumer in what is today Syria. Although their indigenous numbers were decimal, the Akkadians borrowed the Sumerian sexagesimal numbers along with the technologies for representing them, tokens and written notations. Proto-languages, along with analyses of the Akkadian number-words, suggest that Akkadian numbers were quite old, and possibly even older than the Sumerian numbers. Scribes speaking Eblaite, a Semitic language related to Akkadian, were the first to record the Sumerian words for numbers, most likely as a way of learning the Sumerian number-words in addition to the Sumerian numerical notations (much like we might today be inspired to learn the Latin words for numbers to use with the Roman numerals). This development may have shown the Akkadians how to adapt the cuneiform writing system to the Akkadian language. Akkadian use would eventually influence the Sumerian numbers in dramatic ways, for example, changing them from sexagesimal to decimal and organizing them with place value. These changes were likely facilitated by the observable differences between Akkadian decimal and Sumerian sexagesimal numbers.