This article proposes a contribution to the reflection on the invention of the sexagesimal place-value notation, a way of representing numbers which was at the basis of the so-called "Babylonian" mathematics (mathematical texts written in cuneiform script in the Ancient Near East from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE). The history of the sexagesimal place-value notation has already been the subject of numerous studies. It is proposed here to shed some new light on this question not only by

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... ining texts, but also by taking into account the environment of the texts: what happens outside the text itself? What are the activities that accompany the act of writing?