Being first surviving manuscript is not necessarily correct, as this "first" is still only a hand copy of an even earlier but non-surviving manuscript.
On the other hand, I'm sure that 1st Century Christians were clearly given a prophecy that two millennium from their lifetime, how the numbers show as binary will become a critical determining factor of what the number should have been. Just that it wasn't written in their very own book that prophesize about the future.
Egyptians used a kind of base 20 notation for record keeping, but they did their calculations in something which is a kind of binary notation. So, you know, it was a thing. And after all, predicting the future is kinda part of the Bible's thing, particularly Revelations, which is where the whole number of the beast thing comes from.
Also, if I may bring things back to something relevant to this forum, Babylonians used a base 60 form of mathematics, which is called Sexagesimal or sexagenary, either of which sounds like a fun AVN.
