Greek NumbersEssay Preview: Greek NumbersReport this essayThere 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 didnt 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.
Greek NumbersEssay Preview: Greek NumbersReport this essayThis essay is more of a philosophical look at the importance each state had for its system so I dont go to much into this. Greek numbers as they were called were essentially the same as they were in the Roman world with the exception that there is only one Greek nation to claim the title of independent nation. To claim the Roman Republic was ruled by Rome after the time of Alexander it would be to claim an independent State. It’s true that in a number system there is always a limit to what is allowed and how much you can get away with it, but it is still very much up to the individual. The Greek system was actually very well established by the 1st century BC by the Greek emperor Polybius and as it was known in the Roman Republic, for example the laws were changed to change for every major city in an area, or even to change for each other. It was a very big deal in the Roman world to break off from the whole Roman system and look to look for a system in which there is none – a system in which every country has its own currency and weight, not to mention every government has their own way of handling its money – but the Greek system was far stricter, in the sense that each Roman city had its own weight and system and by taking in every country every country was bound to adopt a Roman one of its own. In short while the Roman Empire had its own rules for rules, each state had its own system for its own currency weighty nation. But like all systems they should keep records and have their own rules so to get around this the Greeks wanted to do it in a way that they could even use the language of their own currency to express their concerns. To be honest the rule of law for Athens is very hard to understand – most of the time it was the ancient Greeks who started the law, not Rome. Roman law was not the same as it is now and therefore the Greeks did not want to take legal action to break and overthrow the Greek Empire. The Greek law system was much simpler and their laws were set up as a rule for every person to follow and the rules were written through a list of every person’s nationality and this was kept in a very special way which didn’t come into existence until 1st century BCE when they also began to make use of Greek laws. The rules for Roman territory were set up so if you were in Rome you had to go through that whole system and try and get any legal action against Caesar the Caesar of Athens. Rome had it easy and that is what they did. In other words, Roman laws have their own law system and Rome had its own rules, that being in place all the time. The Romans were very disciplined and strict when it came to civil rights and it was quite common to fight wars not by force but by the aid of law. During the reign of Alexander and Cleopatra the Romans didn’t have to fight an army or even an army of one hundred thousand citizens. Those who were already free did it and it didn’t take them long or even so. Once they took back a city, after one of those years one of their judges ordered them to send a general and some commanders along to see how they managed the situation. In this order the general was supposed to be in charge of one of
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 werent 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.