EGYPTIAN NUMERATION
ASSYRIAN NUMERATION
We have examples of the use of letters in their "abecedarian" or acrostic order in the sections of the one hundred and nineteenth and one hundred and forty-fifth Psalms, which bear the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and in the books of the Iliad, which bear the letters of the Greek alphabet. That alphabet also supplies illustration of the acrologic method, as e.g. Π = Πέντε, for 5; Δ = Δέκα, for 10; H (the old sign for the rough breathing in Ἑκατον), for 100; X = Ξίλιοι, for 1000; Π with Λ (= 5 x 10) inscribed in it standing for 50. A more ingenious method was adopted by both Greeks and Hebrews in the division of the alphabet into three groups: the first to represent units; the second, tens; and the third, hundreds. The use of "Arabic" numerals, besides encountering opposition at the start, was limited until the fifteenth century to the paging of books and mathematical formulæ, but their convenience as compared with the cumbrous Roman figures won them general adoption. Their stages of modification were pictorially suggested by Canon Taylor in a communication to the Academy 28th January 1882, from which the table on [p. 212] is borrowed, but the question of origin remains unsettled.
An age to which, more than to its predecessors, with their more sedate lives, "time is money," may appreciate what service they wrought who invented the few numerals, the relative places of which serve the purpose of recording the commerce of the world. But perhaps the greater admiration is due to the genius which devised the nought or cipher (Arab. sifr, "empty"), without which the labour of calculation and recording would have taxed energy beyond endurance.
The (5) Pehlevi, (6) Armenian, and (7) Georgian alphabets are derived from the Aramean group through the Persian or Iranian. The Pehlevi has abiding interest as the script of the sacred books of the Zend or Parsi religion; but the Armenian and Georgian, with the addition of three or four Greek letters, are bereft of significance except as the surviving representatives of the ancient Persian. The Indo-Bactrian alphabet should have reference here as of Iranian descent, and especially because it is the script of the famous edicts of Asoka, the first royal Buddhist convert, inscribed on a rock near Peshawar.
(b) The Sabæan (from "Sheba") or Himyaritic (from Himyar, the eponymous hero of the Himyarites) group is classed among South Semitic alphabets. The early alphabet of Abyssinia, called Ethiopic or Amharic, is derived from it, and, wherein lies its main importance, also the alphabets of India, the number of which, comprising more than half of the alphabets now in use, would, in detailed treatment, "demand a space wholly disproportionate to any interest which they might possess save to an extremely limited band of specialists." That is Canon Taylor's excuse for passing them over with brevity, and those who care to pursue a subject yielding to few in dryness will find it summarised in the tenth chapter of his work. For the present purpose, the list of alphabets set down in the table will suffice.
(c) The Hellenic.—It was a happy chance that, in the westward course of the Phœnician alphabet, the Greeks were the first to receive it. For while the various scripts of Asia and the Malayan Archipelago, which are derived from that alphabet, have retained, in the main, its consonantal character, leaving the vowels to be only partially indicated, the Greeks, with master-touch, shaped it to relative perfection in adding separate letters to represent the vowels, so that there might be a visible sign for every audible sound of the human voice. Besides this, they put some of the superfluous gutturals and sibilants to new uses, simplified other characters, and ultimately transposed the Semitic mode of writing from right to left by writing from left to right. These, and other changes both in the Greek and its derived alphabets, were made slowly and almost imperceptibly, "descent with modification," to apply the Darwinian phrase concerning plants and animals to the scripts of the world, being as much a feature in their history as in that of organisms generally. To complete the parallel, when a certain stage of adaptation is reached, there is, as e.g. in the case of our own alphabet, mainly through the invention of printing, arrest of development. Nature may aim at perfection, but is content with adjustment, and the works of man abide only as they are, in Stoic maxim, "according to nature."