The Sumerians/Babylonians/Mesopotamians/Akkadians/Etc get short shrift in history because

(1) They were more of a continuous economic system with shifting centers of government across 3000 years than a monolithic culture

(2) Their trade with the cultures Western Europe focuses on was constrained and largely unrecorded

(3) Much of their culture was focused on keeping a Soviet-style socialist system humming along

(4) Their style of writing and computation was kept deliberately complex so that only scribes could do it

(5) Although they kept stringent records, they also switched from clay to paper about the time the barbarian tribes of the Mediterranean started picking up enough of their math to do doggerel versions of it so the records disappeared while the scribes became useless

I read a now-forgotten sci fi book about a precocious kid who... was fundamentally boring, I don't remember much else but one of the "clever" things he did was point out how stupid it is to count in base 10, since it's only divisible once. He figured base 12 was substantially more useful. That really stuck with me.

I have no idea why we don't learn that the Babylonians used base 12 for exactly that reason (they counted knuckle bones, not fingers, and they counted with their thumbs. So they divided the sky into 12 parts, found a constellation for each one, and doubled it for a day. Then they divided it into 12x5 and divided that again into 12x5 and here we still are, metric in everything but time.

There are lots of blind spots in the history of science, culture and economics where if you stare at them long enough, Sargon of Akkad stares back at you.