Greek Numbers

There were no single Greek national standards in the first millennium BC since the various island states basically prided themselves on their independence. This meant that they each had their own currency, weights and measures and stuff. These led to small differences in the number system between different states since a major function of a number system in ancient times was to handle business transactions. However the article didn't go into too much detail to examine the small differences between the system in separate states so they just looked at its general structure instead. They said immediately that the ancient Greeks had different systems for cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers so people must look carefully at what they mean by Greek number systems.

The first Greek number system examined was their acrophonic system which was use in the first millennium BC. Acrophonic actually means that the symbols for the numerals come from the first letter of the number name, so the symbol has come from an abreviation of the word. For 5, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 there will be only one puzzle for the reader and that is the symbol for 5 which should be P if it was the first letter of Pente. However this is just because of changes to the Greek alphabet after the numerals coming from these letters was fixed. By that time the symbols probably weren't thought of as coming from the letters so there was no move to change them with changes to the symbols for the letters. The original form of π was G and so Pente was actually originally Gente.

Now the system was based on the additive principle in a similar way to Roman numerals. This means that 8 is simply VIII, the symbol for five and then three symbols for one.

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