Hold on, this line of analysis doesn't seem to add up. Writing tends to originate as transcribed speech, and the natural order for magnitudes leads from the most-significant: "A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him; a thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the judgment was set, and the books were opened." --Daniel 7:10. In ancient times when these things arose I can't imagine anything else would've flown: King: "How many myriads of the enemy stand before us?" Sage: "Oh exalted one, their number leaves none when divided into tenths; after administering that decimation you will be pleased to discover the remainder is zero; moreover continuing in this way we again achieve nothing; next..." King: "Enough of this, off with his head!" Page: "Too late my lord, they've already breached our gates!" Nor does it seem natural for someone writing in a right-to-left script such as Arabic to reverse direction just for numbers, having to skip over adequate space, etc. So how did it arise? We've heard that the Arabic signs for individual digits were adopted, but are we just assuming that the original positional ordering was preserved? Surely there are scholars who know all about this (I'll bet Knuth does). Similar motivations probably applied to polynomials: that it's a cubic was likely more interesting at the outset than the value of the constant term. Of course it's probably too much to expect this sort of thing to make any kind of sense. Note that we enlightened moderns are most likely conducting this conversation using tools with parts labeled 1234567890 (followed by QWERTYUIOP...!<;-).