Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/47

NUMBER STORIES If Hippias wished to write a number like 2977, he had to use fifteen Greek letters, so you see that arithmetic must have been much harder for the Greek boys than it is for us.

Ι Γ Δ Η Χ GREEK NUMERALS The Greek numerals for 1, 5, 10, 100, and 1000 as Hippias wrote them on parchment

As the years went on there came a time when people felt the need of some easier way of writing numbers for use in the shops of Athens. So it came to pass that another little Hippias, not long before the days when

Χ ΧAttic_00500.svgΗ Η Η ΗAttic_00050.svgΔ Δ Γ Ι Ι NUMBER WRITTEN IN GREEK This is the way that Hippias wrote the number 2977

Paul preached at Athens nearly two thousand years ago, wrote on his parchment roll the letters of the Greek alphabet to represent numbers. The Greek name for the first letter was alpha (ăl'få), and the second letter had 26