Elam was the land to northeast of Sumer and east of Akkad in what is today Iran. Very little is known about the Elamite number system beyond the fact that, like the Akkadians, they borrowed the Sumerian sexagesimal numbers along with the technologies for representing them, tokens and written notations. Like the Akkadians, the Elamites also adapted the Sumerian numbers they borrowed, for example, developing a unique decimal system for counting people and sheep. The Elamite decimal numbers were possibly used in paying wages to local workers, who would not have known the Sumerian sexagesimal numbers used by scribes. A few mysterious notations suggest that the Elamite decimal numbers may have been imported into Sumer, but they don’t seem to have caught on there, possibly because the number system was short-lived in Elam itself. As decimal systems generally emerge from counting on the fingers to ten, the Elamite decimal numbers probably emerged from finger-counting. However, since the Elamite words for numbers were never recorded and their finger-counting was never described, there is no evidence for how the Elamites might have counted on their fingers.