History
Originally, before the adoption of the Greek alphabet, Linear A and Linear B had used a different system, called Aegean numbers, with symbols for 1, 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 operating with the following formula: | = 1, – = 10, ◦ = 100, ¤ = 1000, ☼ = 10000.
The earliest alphabet-related system of numerals used with the Greek letters was a set of the acrophonic Attic numerals, operating much like Roman numerals (which derived from this scheme), with: Ι = 1, Π = 5, Δ = 10, Η = 100, Χ = 1000, Μ = 10000; and with 50, 500, 5000, and 50000 represented by composites of Π and a tiny version of the applicable power of ten. The acrophonic system was replaced by a new alphabetic system, sometimes called the Ionic numeral system, from the 4th century BCE.
Read more about this topic: Greek Numerals
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)