Comment by drob518

This whole endianness issue can be traced to western civilization adopting Arabic numbers. Western languages are written left to right, but Arabic is right to left. Thus, Arabic numbers appear as big-endian when viewed in western languages. Consequently, big-endian appears to be "normal" for us in the modern age. But in Arabic, numbers appear little-endian because everything is right to left. Roman numbers are big-endian, though. Maybe that's why we kept the Arabic ordering even when adopting the system? We could have flipped Arabic numbers around and written them as little-endian, but we didn't.