The numbers in different alphabets

Do you want to keep your financial situation under control and always keep accounts secret? Do them to the "Indian" or if you prefer the "Chinese". Substitute in your accounts the modern numbers by the numbers used by ancient peoples. In this article we show you the numbers of different alphabets : Egyptian, Babylonians, Romans, Indians, Mayans and of course their equivalence with modern numbers.

The Egyptian numbers

The Egyptian numbering system allowed to represent numbers, from one to millions, from the beginning of the use of hieroglyphic writing. At the beginning of the third millennium BC the Egyptians had the first developed decimal system - base number 10. Although it was not a positional system, it allowed the use of large numbers and also described small quantities in the form of unit fractions: the fractions of the Eye of Horus .

The Babylonian numbers

The Mesopotamian numbering system (also called Babylonian numeration) is a system of representation of the numbers in the cuneiform writing of several peoples of Mesopotamia, among them the Sumerians, the Akkadians and the Babylonians.

The Roman numeration

The Roman numeral system is a non-positional numbering system that was developed in Ancient Rome and was used throughout the Roman Empire. This system uses some capital letters as symbols to represent certain numbers, most numbers are written as combinations of letters, for example the year 2012 is written as MMXII (where each M represents 1000, X represents 10 more and II two units more) and one to finish is written I.

The Chinese numbers

Chinese speakers use three numbering systems: the world-wide Indo-Arabic system, along with two other ancient Chinese systems. The system huama (traditional Chinese: 花 碼, Simplified Chinese: 花 码, pinyin: huāmǎ, literally "flowery or sophisticated numbers") has been gradually supplanted by Arabic when writing numbers. The character system is still used and is similar (though not very much) to writing a number in the form of text.

The Indian or Hindu numeration

The Hindu numbering, still used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Burma, is based on grouping two decimal places instead of the usual three in almost all the rest of the world. This numbering system introduces separators between the numbers in the appropriate places for the grouping of two. For example 30 million (3 crore) rupees are written «Rs. 3, 00, 00, 000 », with comma in the levels corresponding to thousand, lakh and crore, instead of« Rs. 30, 000, 000 ».

The Mayan numeration

The Mayans used a system of vigesimal numbering (base 20) of mixed root, similar to that of other Mesoamerican civilizations. The preclassic Maya independently developed the concept of zero around the year 36 a. C.1 This is the first documented use of zero in America, although with some peculiarities that deprived it of operative possibility.2 The inscriptions, sometimes show them working with sums of up to hundreds of millions and dates so extensive that it took several lines to be able to represent them.