Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/48

OF LONG AGO the name beta (bā'tå). When Hippias learned his A B C’s he learned his alpha-betas, and from this name we get our word “alphabet.”

GREEK LETTER-NUMERALS The first ten numbers as the Greeks represented them by letters about two thousand years ago. For larger numbers they used other letters: K' for 20, A' for 30, and so on. They placed a mark (/ or ') by each letter to show that it stood for a number

While Hippias was learning to write numbers in Athens, a boy named Daniel was living on the slope of the Mount of Olives. This boy went daily to Jerusalem with fruit which his father sold in the market place. He needed to know how to write numbers, for the prices of the melons and figs were written on small boards and put upon his father’s fruit stall. It was for this reason that Daniel’s father taught him the smaller numbers that everyone needed to know. In those days, however, a man would work for a penny a day, and so most people had little need for numbers higher than ten, and numbers above a few thousand were rarely used by anyone. 27