Greek Numeration System Is One

Greek numeration system is one of the oldest in the world and still in use in many parts of Greece, especially for the ordinal numbers. The Greek numeration system was based both on its internal invention, as well as the constant interaction with some of the neighboring people, most notably the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, all who had developed their own numeration systems and who thus influenced the Greek one.

There are two types of Greek numerations systems, depending on the moment they came into existence. The first type, predominantly referred to as Herodianic was used as early as 500 BC. As most of the old numeration systems, this was primarily an additive one, with the letters being allocated to the numbers based primarily on the first letter of the way the number was said. For example, penta was five, so the letter pi was designated to be the one representing the number five. In a similar manner, the letter symbol for 10 was the letter delta, which was because the number was referred to as deka and thus started with that respective letter.

This system was pretty much replaced with the Ionic system later on. The Ionic system was primarily based on the Greek alphabet, because it implied that for each unit 1 through 9, a letter of the alphabet would be allocated, a mechanism which was also applied for the tens (10 through to 90) and the hundreds (100 through to 900). However, the Greek alphabet only had 24 letters, which meant that three new ones were added for this purpose alone. These letters were digamma (an almost double gamma), qoppa and sampi. These letters were allocated for 9, 90 and 900 respectively.

At the same time, after each number thus written, a small sign would be added in the form of a ' so that the reader would know that the reference was made to a number rather than to a word. Following these rules, the formation of the numbers is intuitive: the number would be split into hundreds, tens and units and the letters combined to give the graphical representation. This was a derived version of the addition numerical system that was used in the ancient times.

An additional problem was the fact that the system proved difficult to use initially for numbers that were larger than 999. What the Greeks did was add an extra stroke before the letter to symbolize that the respective number would be multiplied by 1000. This meant that you would now be able to include any kind of larger numbers with that stroke.