Page:A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I (1928).djvu/43

Rh ; i.e., “Total of expenditures during our office three hundred and fifty-three talents. . . . .”



36. The exact reason for the displacement of the Herodianic symbols by others is not known. It has been suggested that the commercial intercourse of Greeks with the Phoenicians, Syrians, and Hebrews brought about the change. The Phoenicians made one important contribution to civilization by their invention of the alphabet. The Babylonians and Egyptians had used their symbols to represent whole syllables or words. The Phoenicians borrowed hieratic signs from Egypt and assigned them a more primitive function as letters. But the Phoenicians did not use their alphabet for numerical purposes. As previously seen, they represented numbers by vertical and horizontal bars. The earliest use of an entire alphabet for designating numbers has been attributed to the Hebrews. As previously noted, the Syrians had an alphabet representing numbers. The Greeks are supposed by some to have copied the idea from the Hebrews. But Moritz Cantor argues that the Greek use is the older and that the invention of alphabetic numerals must be ascribed to the Greeks. They used the twenty-four letters of their alphabet, together with three strange and antique letters, (old van),  (koppa),  (sampi), and the symbol. This change was decidedly for the worse, for the old Attic numerals were less burdensome on the memory