PSychoyos Semiotica Libre

The forgotten art of isopsephy
and the magic number KZ*

DIMITRIS K. PSYCHOYOS
Abstract
This paper discusses the relation between letters and numbers in the case of
ancient Greek and other writing systems and supports that priority must be
given to the numbers, that is to say the use of letters of the alphabet (and so
the writing of the language) was constrained by the necessities of mathematics. In the case of Ancient Greece the `24 letters of the alphabet' plus
`3 additional signs' were used to notate the numbers. These 27 signs formed
the three enneads of the Greek (Milesian) Numeral System, which was in
use in Eastern Mediterranean and parts of Europe for almost 2,000 years
(700 BC until 1200 AD). So, the 24 letter-signs were also digit-signs. The
arithmetic use of letters is considered by epigraphologists and Hellenists a
later development, occurring two or three centuries after the invention of
the Greek alphabet. This paper supports that, from the very beginning, the
alphabet should have had 27 signs in order to meet the needs of mathematics, that is to meet the necessity of using the enneads of the Egyptian numeral system, which probably was transferred to Greeks via the Semitic
writing system. This hypothesis is based on the contradictions which arise
between the choice of signs and their use (as can be seen from the statistical
analysis of ancient texts), from ancient Greek `Logistike' (mathematical
calculations), from archaeological nds and from the examples of other
writing systems, which were also created (or adapted accordingly) so as to
serve the needs of mathematics namely Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and other alphabets. Consequently, the alphabet should not
be considered as a secondary system of signs, which was created in order to
record the spoken word, but as a subset of a broader semiotic system that
attempts to express human Reason in general.
Semiotica 1541/4 (2005), 157224
00371998/05/01540157
6 Walter de Gruyter
158
1.
1.1.
D. K. Psychoyos
How wise was the inventor of the Greek alphabet?
The great transformation
Most of the scholars who have studied the formation of the Greek system
of writing have focused their interest on the problem of vowels that is,
on the fact that the Greeks ascribed to certain signs of the Phoenician
consonantary the values of vowels as they adopted them into their own
system, in such a way creating the very rst `real alphabet' in the world,
a signary which could represent with written signs (almost) all the phonemes of their language. According to certain scholars, this outcome
could be interpreted from the fact that Phoenician texts could be understood relatively easily without vowels, whereas that would not have been
the case with the Greek. This is because Semitic languages, like Phoenician, are based signicantly on clusters of consonants, which allow total
`lexical' comprehension of the words in the written texts, while IndoEuropean languages, like Greek, do not have this characteristic.1 In addition, certain scholars seem to think that the Greeks devised their alphabet
because they wanted to record the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, where the dominant element is the prosodic meter, the dactylic hexameter, which is formed by the alternation of long and short syllables,
created by the long and short vowels they contain.2
It is dicult for one to deal in any depth with the question of correspondence between alphabetic signs and sounds for Archaic or even Classical Greece, given the dierences in the speech and the script of Greeks
in dierent regions and dierent eras. There were, for instance, various
local (èpichoric') dialects which were recorded with dierent local scripts,
and the corresponding alphabets are divided into certain categories that,
for historical reasons, are standardised by color codes: Red, Blue, Green
alphabets. There are the monumental reference works of Guarducci
(1967) and Jeery and Johnston (1990), as well as thousands of articles
and monographs, which deal with exactly this subject. Just as the dialects
developed over the years, so did their transcription. Initially (eighth to
fth century BC) neither the number of letters in each alphabet nor the
phonetic values of each letter corresponded with each other from region
to region. For instance, B in Corinth had the phonetic value which was
attributed to E in Athens; the Athenians' E would correspond to [e], [E:],
[e:]; while in Ionia it only had the phonetic value [e]. H was used by Athenians to represent the rough aspirate (spiritus asper), for which the `psilotic' Ionians had presumably no need so they used it for rendering
the vowel [E:]. From the beginning of the fourth century, however, following the example of Athens, the Greek cities started, one by one, to
Isopsephy and the magic number KZ
159
adopt the `24 letters of the Ionic alphabet' as the ocial system of writing, even though certain of its elements had become widespread much
earlier. In this way, the Ionic alphabet resulted in being the common system of writing the Greek language until the Byzantine reform that established the minuscule script almost 1,300 years later, in the ninth century
AD.3
The Attic dialect, which later formed the basis for the Koine Greek,
and the way it was represented in written signs, are a useful example
that could help sustain the main argument of this paper. Phonetically,
Attic was characterized by a system of ve short vowels and seven long
vowels. Therefore, on the basis of the Ionic alphabet and the phonetic
values the Ionians had attributed to its letters, the vowels of the Attic dialect, which is so closely related to the Ionic that certain scholars claim
them to be identical, have been represented as follows:
Table 1.
The Attic system of vowels 4
Short
Long
Dikhrona
E [e]
O [o]
H [E:]
OY [u:]
W [O:]
EI [e:]
A [a], [a:]
I [i], [i:]
Y [y], [y:]
It is evident that the Ionians were economical in the use of signs for
vowels: on the one hand, they judged that there should be four dierent
signs (E, H, O, W) to express [e], [E:], [o], [O:] respectively, but that one
sign alone was sucient for each one of the three pairs ([a], [a:]), ([i],
[i:]), ([y], [y:]); in other words, the three signs A, I, Y, respectively, which
later on, for this reason, were named `dikhrona' by Alexandrian grammarians, because at times they had the value of a long vowel and at other
times the value of a short vowel. In addition, for the long vowels [e:] and
[u:] they preferred to use clusters of two-vowel signs, the digraphs EI and
OY, rather than create new ones. Other Greeks proved even more economical with the signs of their alphabets: until the Athenians adopted
the Ionic alphabet, they used O in order to render three vowels ([o], [O:],
[u:]) and E to render another three ([e], [E:], [e:]).5
Indeed, on the basis of the generally accepted views concerning how
the Greeks spoke at least until the Alexandrine era, there would have
had to have been ve dierent signs to express the dierent vowels in
their speech, which are, in fact, represented only by the character A in
writing. Since, apart from there being a `long' and a `short' A, there was
160
D. K. Psychoyos
also an accented one: àcute' or `grave' or `circumex' not in the contemporary sense of `stress accentuation' in the Modern Greek language,
that is to say an accentuation based on the increase or decrease in the intensity of the sound of speech, but in the sense of the rise and fall in pitch,
as in the Chinese language nowadays.6 In order for the full phonetic value
to be attributed to the vowels, there must have been the letters À short
acute,' À short grave,' À long acute,' À long grave,' ànd A long circumex.'7 The same must have happened with I and Y, because they
also appear in the same ve tonic variants. For the other vowel signs of
the Greek script, the long H and W must have existed in three accent
variants (grave, acute, circumex), while the short E-O in two accent
variants (grave, acute). Judging from the importance that is attributed to
the invention of the vowel signs by the Greeks, and on the basis of its
practical application in the existing signs for vowels, we must obviously
conclude that the Greeks did not intend to create the Ìonian Phonetic Alphabet' as a precursor to the International Phonetic Alphabet: they considered it useless, and in fact harmful, to increase the number of the signs
of their alphabet, probably because if there had been stoikheia (i.e., elements, as they called the letters) for all these phonetic values of vowels,
the system would have become cumbersome due to the large number of
its signs. In any case, the real `phonological transparency' (Skoyles 1990)
of the Greek alphabet in relation to the Semitic consonantaries, which
either omit vowels completely (Phoenician) or use matres lectionis (Aramaic), seems to be dulled somewhat by this polysemy of vowel-signs. It
must also be noted that phonological transparency does not imply a semantic one as well: the fact that one can read and pronounce the word
`BOYSTPOFHDON' more easily than the word `BSTPFDN' does not
necessarily mean that she can understand it.
Matres lectionis, `mothers of reading,' is the name given to certain
signs of the Semitic alphabets, which while normally representing `weak
consonants,' were also used in writing to denote long vowels. Generally
speaking, recording vowels by matres lectionis creates scriptio plena, `full
writing,' whereas not recording them constitutes scriptio defectiva or `defective writing.' Scriptio plena of course reminds us of the Greek invention of the systematic rendering of all the vowels with special signs
and in fact the same ones as were used in the scriptio plena: these are the
consonants aleph, he, waw, yod, which correspond to the Greek elements
A, E, , I (the fact that was used in the Greek script as a consonant
explains, according to Gelb, the creation of Y with vowel values [y], [y:]
in order to replace the original waw, that is the Greek digamma).8 For
this reason, certain scholars claim that the origins of the Greek writing
system are Aramaic (and not Phoenician), because the Aramaeans used
161
matres lectionis while the Phoenicians did not. In any event, the use of
matres lectionis is not systematic in Semitic scripts: it diers according to
writer, text and period.
1.2.
The additional signs
The fact that the usual 24 letter Greek alphabet in its Ionic form,
which was to become Panhellenic includes at its end ve additional
signs (Y, F, X, C, W) which follow the 22 letters of the Phoenician consonantary (while excluding three others in the middle of it), is considered
of minor importance: it seems quite understandable that the Greeks
needed these new ve signs in order to express sounds that did not exist
in the Phoenician speech and the three Phoenician letters were dropped
later as phonetically useless. And although it is obvious that the addition of the vowel-signs Y and W serves the `Greek need for vowels,' with
the limitations already mentioned, what use did the consonants F, X, C
serve? If the economy of signs, mainly in the case of A, I and Y, and
partly in the case of the remaining vowels, constitutes an act of wisdom,
so that there would not be too many letters proving the alphabet dicult
to use, then how should we characterise the invention and the incorporation into the alphabetic sequence of the consonant C [ps], which could
also be written as PS or FS, as in the archaic writing systems of certain
regions, with Attica among them, earlier than 400 BC, and for which
there was consequently no need for a special sign?9
According to Woodward (1997: 208 .), these dierences between local
Greek alphabets, concerning the double consonants C [ps] and X [ks]
(and others, concerning F and X; see below in this section and in section
4.3), are due to isolated initiatives undertaken by groups of scribes,
mainly Cypriot ones, who added and/or removed at will signs from the
`new' ones which were placed at the end of the alphabet.10 The questions
about the wisdom of that Panionian Committee of Scribes, formed ad hoc
to resolve the problems which these Cypriot scribes' arbitrary decisions
had created, so that the Ionic alphabet would be able to give an accurate
rendition of the (basically Ionic) Homeric epics, become even greater if we
take a look at Appendix A: C is the rarest sign in the Iliad and the Odyssey. There are only 1,274 C's in the Homeric epics, which means that the
frequency of C is .1%, or one C every 1,000 letters, one every 20 lines approximately.11 On the contrary, the signs A and I, with frequencies of
10.6% and 10.0% respectively, occupy the second and third places: every
verse in the Iliad or the Odyssey includes approximately four A's and four
I's, of which some are long and have the `circumex' or the àcute' or
162
D. K. Psychoyos
`grave' accents, while others are short and have the àcute' or `grave' accents. In addition, there are about 15,000 EI's and 10,000 OY's in the
Homeric texts, one every two to three lines.12 It is obvious that any `creator of alphabets,' endowed with a minimum of intelligence, if allowed to
add new signs, would have done with A and I what had been previously
done with O: she would have created at least one new sign A, in order to
represent, say, the `long A,' keeping the existing A for the `short A,' and
she would not have bothered to create a special new sign for the exceptionally rare sound [ps], which could be rendered with the already existing
signs.13
There is always, of course, the rival argument, stating that the dierence between the long and short sounds which are represented by the
vowels A, I and Y was never important, therefore it was not worth noting, whereas for the sounds expressed by (E, H) and (O, W) the dierence
was great, and this is how H and W emerged. However, what we have
here is actually a vicious circular argument: the fact that dierences in
phonetic values were never important enough, so as to be expressed with
dierent elements, should rather be inferred from independent and valid
data of some other kind, and not by the absence of letter-signs alone,
as is the case here. But even if we accept that things are so for the three
dikhrona vowels, is it not strange that there are no special signs for the
otherwise quite common [u:] (OY) and [e:] (EI), which we must accept
that apparently express considerably dierent sounds, since a special way
of writing them was chosen? Unless the script itself is not phonetic, unless
generations upon generations of grammarians who edited the Homeric
texts changed some Y's into OY's or some H's into EI's in order to indicate dierences which, to them, were very real, but which some earlier
copyists had probably leveled. Or because they believed that the songs
the blind and illiterate Homer sang should have been written down like
this from the beginning, and the very rst person to record them on papyrus or diphtherae had made some errors.14
In Appendix A we can also see that apart from C, the signs for the consonants Z and X were also useless: they are actually at the very bottom of
the table of frequencies, appearing only slightly more frequently than C,
while at the same time these two signs also indicate compound sounds
which could be represented as SD and KS (or XS) respectively, in accordance with the prevailing notions about the phonetics of the Ancient
Greek tongue.15 These signs were inherited by the Greeks from the Phoenician consonantary, but since the phonetic values they represented in
Greek were exceptionally rare and could be expressed with characters already in existence, why were they not used to indicate the `long' versions
of A and I, or for OY and EI? The question could possibly be answered
163
by assuming that ancient Greeks used as vowel signs only the signs that
were already in use in their Semitic version as matres lectionis, as Gelb
(1973: 200203) suggests. This view is supported by Young's (1969) point
that the Phrygians developed the same system of vowels independently
of the Greeks, through direct contact with the Semites on the borders
of Cilicia. However, Young's point has not met with enough support
from among the Hellenists (for instance, Lejeune 1970). But if ancient
Greeks were so inuenced by Semitic tradition, how can we explain their
extremely radical initiative in creating new signs, these after the T? Of
course, besides the four vowels signs (A, E, I, [Y]) which may have
originated from matres lectionis, there are also the signs H, O, and W, of
`heretic' or obscure descendance, because het and ayin (the Semitic precursors of H and O) were not matres lectionis and W is not one of the 22
known Semitic signs.16
We also see in Appendix A that, generally speaking, the signs that the
Greeks are supposed to have added to the Phoenician alphabet were not
particularly successful: F and X, with equal frequencies of appearance
(1.1%) fare better than C in their claim for a place in the Homeric texts
but certain early Greeks, like the islanders of Creta and Thera, seem to
have thought them both superuous to be included in their archaic alphabets, possibly because of the rarity of the aspirated sounds which they
stood for: they expressed (F, X) with (P, K) in Creta and (PH, KH) in
Thera, where H stands for spiritus asper. Y has a much better performance with a frequency of 3.6% (which approaches the average of 4.2%
for the 24 signs), but here too we note something unusual: in the nal versions of its use, Y has also consonantal values, the value of [f ] and of [v]
in the well known diphthongs AY and EY, the number of which is not
insignicant: there are about 4,300 AY's and 6,200 EY's in both the Iliad
and the Odyssey.
If we presume that during the meeting of the Panionian Committee of
Scribes, which was called in order to make denite decisions about the
Greek alphabet at some time during the eighth century if we presume
then that some active lobby of grammarians pressed for the addition of
new signs (like Y, F, X, C, W) into the Phoenician alphabet, while another lobby was supporting the preservation of the existing Phoenician
signs with respective changes in their phonetic values (as happened with
A, E, H, O), and that some third lobby insisted that the Phoenician consonantary was the best and did not need any changes (as happened with
most consonants), the Panionian Committee, in the compromising result
it brought about, would have been worse than any other contemporary
Parliamentary Committee. There is of course the hypothesis that there
has been a single creator of the Greek alphabet the famous Adapter, a
164
D. K. Psychoyos
`practical [man], with a good ear' who improvised the Greek alphabet
on the spur of the moment, while conversing with some Phoenician
according to Powell's (1991: 2544) elegant and illustrative description.
In such a case, this inventor of a signary with a glorious history of 3,000
years, the one who helped so many people by guiding them in the creation of their own alphabets, this great admirer of Homer, who actually
preserved the epics of the poet, was not so wise: on the contrary, he was
less `practical' than even Samuel Morse who, in the short-lived, on-theway-to-extinction àlphabet' that he created for his telegraph, provided
each `letter' with a number of signs inversely proportional to its frequency
in English script, so that there would be economy in the writing of telegrams. Gelb (1973: 90), who rst attempted to give shape to the science
of Grammatology, to the study of writing that is, put special emphasis
on the `principle of economy,' according to which principle the systems of
writing attempt to convey the spoken language eectively, by using as
small as possible a number of signs. Greek script was not economical: it
economized to the point of meanness in useful parts and was generous to
the point of extravagance in useless parts.
The (eventual) satisfaction that the supporters of Afro-Asian-centrism
have possibly felt by reading this paper so far by nding out, in other
words, that the forefathers of the conquering Western Culture were probably distinguished by a lack of genius, and that the very the foundations
of the `Greek Wonder' were actually crumbling is not meant to last
long: the same story will be repeated 1,500 years later with the Arabic
alphabet.17 During the seventh and eighth centuries AD, there was a reformation of the Northern Arabic system of writing, in which another six
signs were added to the existing 22 (a heritage from the Phoenician signary via the Aramaic) for reasons almost similar to the hypothetical
necessity of recording the Homeric epics: in order to render in a more accurate way the sacred text of Islam, the Qur'an. In Appendix B, which
shows the frequency of the signs of the Arabic alphabet in the Qur'an,
we can see that two of the newly added signs occupy the last positions
and, with one exception, all the others have a rather bad performance, indeed worse on the whole in relation to the Greek case: those six new Arabic signs have (all together) a frequency of 4%, whereas the ve Greek
signs reach a 8.9%.18
Were the ancient scribes so thoughtless? Did they not realize that, at
some point in the distant future, they would meet with the scorn of any
narrow-minded statistician who would attempt to see for herself how
functional and useful their creations were? Before passing judgment, let
us return to the previous remark concerning the use of Y, which ended
up by expressing also the consonants [f ], [v], except for the vowels [y],
165
[y:]: it reminds us that the Greeks had initially used the Phoenician
(waw, digamma in Greek) to denote these consonantal sounds before Y
took over and this fact reminds us, in turn, that the complete Ionic
alphabet has 27 signs. That is to say, apart from the 24 well-known
ones, which are called `letters of the Greek alphabet,' there were another
three, those named èpisemata' (additional signs) by the Byzantines:
(or F, digamma), (koppa), (sampi).19 The rst two had already existed
in the Phoenician alphabet and been removed, while for the third there
are dierent conjectures concerning its origin and its name.20 What is certain, however, is that these 27 signs have been indispensable for the system
of writing, in order to let it perform one more function besides recording
the Greeks' speech; in order to let it perform the unspoken, to accomplish a
fact that language alone is incapable of doing: mathematics and arithmetical calculations.
2. The alphabetic system of numerals and isopsephy

In order to write words and numbers, the Greeks used the same signs
for letters and digits (as seen in Table 2), which had the general name of
stoikheia (elements).21 If the alphabet is called Ionic, the numeral system
which is based on it is called Milesian, after the most important Ionic city
of ancient times, Miletus, the homeland of Thales, Anaximander and
Anaximenes, a famous cultural center in itself, when Athens was still an
insignicant town. The existence of exactly the same signs (stoikheia) to
denote letters and digits means that any sign of the Ionic alphabet may
have had a dierent phonetic value as a letter (long, short, accentuated,
etc., like A, I, Y), according to the word which contained it and according to its position in that word, but as a digit it always had the same numerical value in the context of the Milesian Numeral System, as dened in
Table 2 and with an accent (0 ) as a diacritical mark at the upper right
Table 2. Elements and their values as digits in the Greek writing system. The signs in the rst
line, A-Y (19) are the pythmenes (bottoms) or bases of the numeral system
1
A
2
B
3
G
4
D
5
E
7
Z
8
H
9
Y
10
I
20
K
30
L
40
M
50
N
60
X
70
O
80
P
90
100
P
200
S
300
T
400
Y
500
F
600
X
700
C
800
W
900
166
D. K. Psychoyos
corner, the element could also be a ùnitary fraction,' a fraction with numerator 1 and denominator the corresponding digit.
The Milesian numeral system was decimal but additive, not positional
like the system in use today. For instance, the expression POH had the
arithmetical value of 100 70 8 178 (expressed in the contemporary
positional decimal system), but it could also be read on the basis of the
phonetic values of its signs as the Greek word `roh,' meaning ùx'. The
expression HOP makes no sense as a Greek word, but it still has its
arithmetical value of 178, since numbers could be written with the smallest digit rst and it seems that this was rather common for numbers
smaller than 1,000, especially outside Attica.22 The fact, however, that
the system is additive and consequently the total numerical value is stable
and irrespective of the position of the digits, means that the same number
(178) could have been written in six dierent ways: HOP, HPO, OHP,
OPH, PHO, POH. For instance, if somebody had to open three money
bags containing drachmas, and in the rst she would count 100, in the
second 8, and in the third 70, she would record them in this order, PHO,
and she would not need to change it to POH or HOP: the notation PHO
would clearly show the number it represented. If the rst money bag,
however, contained 100, the second 65, and the third 8, the counter would
note down rst P XE H (100 65 8), and she would probably condense
the P XE H by carrying out the sum X E H OG (60 5 8 73),
in which case she would note down next to PXEH the number POG.23
In order to represent the numbers above 1,000 and up to 9,000, the
Greeks used the sequence of signs A-Y (19) with some diacritical mark:
an accent down on the left, or the character (900) with the same digit as
exponent:24
0
BWKB 2,000 800 20 2 2,822 B WKB
Then would come the myriads (10,000), which were represented by

M 10,000 and the required number as exponent:
M LA 0 BWKB 31 10,000 2,000 800 20 2 312,822
Yet it was possible for the myriads to be represented also by the signs
MY, the rst letters of the word `MYPIAS' of course, or even by a stop
(). Then the number 312,822 would be written
LA MY 0 BWKB
or
LA
0
BWKB
167
The latter version reminds us of our positional (Arabic-Indian) representation of the numbers, actually introducing the myriads as a new order
of magnitude, the way the thousands are for us today. It should be noted
that up until the seventeenth century and along with the use of the contemporary positional system, the myriads are being preserved in certain
cases as a distinct class, and the number 312,812 can be also written as
31,1812 (Peyroux n.d.: 8).
In order to distinguish the elements-letters from the elements-digits,
therefore the numbers from the words, the Greeks used a variety of
ways, among which for instance the system of enclosing all the digits of
a number within certain diacritical marks or highlighting them with horizontal lines above them. Thus, the number
178 POH
could be isolated in order to distinguish it from the surrounding words
in various ways: `POH', 3POH4, POH , POH, but this did not always
happen, as Guarducci informs us (1967, 1: 424), based on evidence from
monumental inscriptions. We know that this diversication was much less
systematic in papyrus texts (see the fragment from the Hibeh Papyri [P.
Hib. i. 27] in Fowler 1999: plate 7) and probably non-existent when somebody had in front of her a wax-tablet or a lead plate or a clay sherd and
was doing arithmetical calculations. Since all the elements were digits, the
writer had no reason to note that they were not letters.
Concluding this necessarily brief description, we must point out that
the Milesian Numeral System was probably of Egyptian origin.25 The
Egyptian arithmetic system was also decimal and was organized into enneads, just like the Greek but it had four enneads instead of three: in
other words, there were nine dierent signs for the numbers 1,0009,000,
which the Greeks represented, as mentioned earlier, with accents or other
diacritical marks on the pythmenes or with A -B . The Babylonians
used the sexagesimal (base 60) arithmetic system, which the Greeks seem
to have used only (or chiey) in their Astronomy and probably after the
second century BC. Naturally, the 36 signs that the Egyptians used for
the digits of their enneads bear no resemblance to the Greeks ones, and
as far as we know, these 36 signs were not used as letters, that is to say,
for the representation of speech.26
2.1.
Multiplying with elements as factors
As far as arithmetical operations are concerned, relating to addition and

subtraction the Greek system does not dier substantially from the other
168
D. K. Psychoyos
additive systems of antiquity, the Babylonian or the Egyptian (van der

Waerden 1988). For multiplication, however, and subsequently also for
division, there was the `Greek way,' which was very dierent from and
much more ecient than the Egyptian and represented, in its basic principles, the contemporary method of carrying calculations. It was sucient
for the Greeks, as it is for us today, to know by heart the `Pythagorean
Table,' in other words the product of the numbers from A A to I I
(1 1 to 10 10), and not from A A to as one might be
led to believe because the digits of their numeral system go up to there.27
We have clear references concerning this, references namely that the calculations were made with the help of the `pythmenes' or `bases,' the digits
AY.28 The pythmen (base) of I and P (of 10 and 100) is A (1). The pythmen of K (20) and S (200) is B (2), etc. So, apart from the organization
of the arithmetic system into enneads, there is also an organisation into
triads, which is associated with the mathematical operations of multiplication and division: it is about the triads (A, I, P; 1, 10, 100), (B, K, S; 2,
20, 200), (G, L, T; 3, 30, 300) . . . (Y, , ; 9, 90, 900). Theoretically, the
multiplication between one digit numbers (viz. of all the digits A, B, G . . .
) is based on the Rule of Archimedes, which denes how the nal result
can be deduced from the intermediary result that occurs from the multiplication of the pythmenes.29 In practice, it must have taken place as is
described below, with upper indices to count how many steps the initial
factors were away from their base (pythmen) and how many steps every
digit of the intermediary result must be moved on the ladder of enneads:
P L H 1 G 1 H G 11 KD 2 0 BY
This corresponds exactly to our own multiplication with exponents of 10:
80 30 8 10 1 3 10 1 8 3 10 11 24 10 2 2,400
That is to say, in order to multiply: we count how many steps we move on
the ladder of the enneads to reach the pythmen of each factor; we multiply
the pythmenes on the basis of the Pythagorean Table to nd the intermediary product; then we move every digit of that intermediary result as many
steps as the sum of steps we made initially.
If, by moving on the enneads, we reach the last ennead P, S, . . . and
we must continue to count steps, we return to the rst, the pythmenes, but
the digits we meet now are in thousands. In the previous example we can
see from Table 2 that the pythmen of P is H, which is a step's distance,
and the pythmen of L is G, which is similarly a step's distance. The intermediary result of the multiplication of the two pythmenes is H G KD
169
(8 3 24), and every digit of KD must be moved two steps, which is

the sum of steps done to reach the pythmenes. Starting with K the steps,
the digit in the rst ennead below K is S, and with the next step we return
to pythmen B, which is now in thousands. So, as in the rst ennead below
D there is M and in the second there is Y, the nal result is 0 BY (2,400).
Naturally, the Greeks did not use Arabic numerals in order to count the
steps, but in some way (with marks around their calculation, or using
their ngers or from memory) they marked how many enneads they
passed for each of the factors until they reached the pythmenes, they
carried out the multiplication and moved every digit of the intermediary
result as many enneads as the sum of steps they had done initially. This
algorithm corresponds exactly with the contemporary algorithm of multiplication of numbers and the addition of zeroes at the end of the result:
W L H 2 G 1 H G21 KD 3 0 K0 D M B 0 D
800 30 8 10 2 3 10 1 8 3 10 12 24 10 3 24,000
In this example, we can nd from Table 2 that the pythmen of the rst
factor W is H and it appears two enneads further, of the second factor L
it is G, one ennead further. The product of the two pythmenes H G will
give us KD again, as in the former example, but now the sum of initial
steps is three. Starting with K and counting three steps, that is three enneads, we have successively:
K, S, 0 B, 0 K,
and starting with D and moving through three enneads we have:
D, M, Y, 0 D,
so the result is:
0
K0 D (24,000), or in myriads M B 0 D.
The signicant dierence in the way we multiply numbers today is that

for us the similarity in the written sequence 2, 20, 200, is obvious, while
those who used the alphabetic numeral system would have had to remember that `the triad of two is B, K, S,' in other words, to know by heart not
only the Pythagorean Table with the form
H B I (8 2 16)
but also the 27 digits (instead of our 9) ordered in the nine triads.
170
D. K. Psychoyos
Apart from the fact that the algorithm which has been described constitutes the empirical application of the Rule of Archimedes, an indication
of the way multiplications were carried out (that is, with the pythmenes of
the signary with counting steps and with `memorization of the triads') is
provided by a papyrus (Papyri Vindobonensis [P. Vindob. G. 40552] in
Vienna), which comes certainly from a period much later than the invention of the Greek alphabet, but denitely one in which arithmetic was being done with elements-digits, i.e. the fth and sixth centuries AD. This
papyrus is an exercise on the multiplication of dierent numbers by the
number 9, in the following way:30
Table 3. Multiplication of the triads (Y, M, D), (F, N, E) . . . (W, P, H) by Y
Y]Y 0 GX
F]Y 0 DF
X]Y 0 EY
C]Y 0 T
W]Y 0 ZS
MYTX
NYYN
XYFM
OYXL
PYCK
DY[L
EYME
YND
ZYXG
HYOB
40 9 360
50 9 450
60 9 540
70 9 630
80 9 720
4 9 36
5 9 45
6 9 54
7 9 63
8 9 72
In our system:
400 9 3,600
500 9 4,500
600 9 5,400
700 9 6,300
800 9 7,200
It is clear, I think, that the attempt made is not only for the student to
memorize the triads (Y, M, D), (F, N, E) . . . (W, P, H), that is the rst
letter of each of the above columns, but also to understand that she can
nd the result by moving up and down on the digits of each triad of the
results, that is the two last letters of each column: (0 G, T, L), (X, X, ),
etc. What we must also note is that signs are not used to indicate multiplications, additions, or anything else. Also, there is no distinctive mark
to show that the elements are used as digits, nor are the indicated calculations separated from each other than by a short space between them; that
is, the rst line of the Table 3 has in eect the form:
Y]Y0 GX MYTX DY[L
In the sequence of signs
MYTX
171
of the rst line, it is understood, without any indication, that the rst two
are factors multiplied by each other and their product is the sum of the
second two. According to modern convention for notating arithmetical
operations, this abracadabra MYTX would have been written:
M Y T X 40 9 360
Consequently, an accidental fragment of papyrus or a scratch on a
sherd with any of the signs MES, ENI, MOPI, SKI, could have meant:
MES
M E S 40 5 200
ENI
E N : I 5 50 : 10
MOPI M O P I 40 70 110
SKI
S : K I 200 : 20 10
The question whether some sequence of elements constitutes a number

or word, proves to be even more unmanoeuvrable given that, in order
to express the divisions with remainder, the Greeks (like the Egyptians)
used the so-called unit fractions, that is to say fractions with the unit as
numerator using as denominator the same elements they used for
writing words or integral numbers.31 From papyri of the later Hellenistic period we nd out that, with the sole exception of 12 which has a special sign (something like <, an L with acute angle), the remaining unitary fractions are represented by the sign of their denominator accented
1
1
at the top right: G 0 13 , D 0 14 , E 0 15 , 0 16 ; . . . W 0 800
, 0 900
0
2 32
with B 3 . But just as the conventions of word and number separation and distinction are not kept systematically, in the same way the rule
about the accentuation of fractions is broken when it is clear from the
context that it is a case of fractions so that the sequence of signs
ABG
could have indicated not only àn abortive abecedarium,' as is usually
presented, but also:
A B G 1 2 3
and maybe:
A B0 G0

2 1
1 :
3 3
172
D. K. Psychoyos
Expressions of the form,

TABTWNYSXB
which look `magic' and incomprehensible in Greek language, indicate calculations with fractions, as the papyrologists know very well. This particular one means
`TA B 0 3MEPH4 TWN Y 3EISI4 SXB 0 '
that is
`The B 0 parts of Y are SXB 0 ,'
in other words, with modern
notation, it corresponds to the multiplication of Y ( 400) by B 0 23 which has as result the compound fraction
266 23 :
2
2
2
400 200 60 6 266 266:666 . . .
3
3
3
For the multi-digit numbers, like POH ( 178), multiplication was carried out by breaking down the factors as we do today. For example, using
the present day symbols for the operations, so that they can be understood step by step, the product NB POH (52 178) would have
emerged like this, if the multiplication had been recorded analytically:
NB POH N B P O H
N P O H B P O H
N P N O N H B P B O B H
E 1 A 2 E 1 Z 1 E 1 H B A 2
B Z 1 B H
E 3 LE 2 M 1 B 2 ID 1 I
0 E 0 GF Y S PM I
0 YBN
Naturally, the experts at `logistike,' i.e., in the algorithms for arithmetical operations, would have completed it in considerably fewer steps,
173
and many mathematicians would have been able to do calculations like

N O from memory, without having to go up and down the enneads
computing the partial products. In any case, for this method to be implemented, it is essential to have an integer number of enneads of signs:
it demands namely 18, 27, 36, 45, . . . signs.33 If anyone had to multiply numbers whose product reached 999,999 (0 0 0 YY), the system worked with 27 signs. However, if the result of multiplication surpassed 1,000,000, there should also exist signs for the millions, which
could once again be the 27 digit letters with two diacritical marks, (e.g.,
00 A 1,000,000 10 6 , 00 B 2,000,000 2 10 6 . . . 00 900,000,000
900 10 6 ), or three diacritical marks for the billions (000 B 2,000,000,000
2 10 9 ) so that we would have a system similar to the modern one, in
which every àccent' would indicate `three zeroes.' However, the Ancient
Greeks chose to add yet another ennead (namely, the numbers 0 A 0 Y, or
1,0009,000), raising the total of available digits to 36; in this case, if they
had to return to the pythmenes while going up the enneads, the signs now
would correspond to myriads (10,000), while the triads necessary for multiplication would become tetrads: (A, I, P, 0 A), (B, K, S, 0 B), etc. An example follows:
0
H T H 3 G 2 H G 32 KD5 M S M M M SM
8,000 300 8 10 3 3 10 2 8 3 10 23
24 10 5 2,400,000
Where ve steps starting with K is K, S, 0 B, B, K, S, therefore S

myriads. Five steps starting with D is D, M, Y. 0 D, D, M, therefore M
myriads. Total SM myriads, that is MSM . This system is able to record
numbers up to M0 0 0 YY0 YY 9,999,999,999. The extension to a
fourth ennead and the consequent appearance of the myriad ( 10,000)
as the next order of magnitude must be due, as mentioned above, to the
fact that the Egyptians had exactly the same decimal system with 36
signs, i.e., four enneads.34
From the extant Egyptian papyri containing mathematical calculations, it appears that the Egyptians did not use the Pythagorean Table
for multiplication prior to the `hellenisation' of their mathematics during
the Ptolemaic period, with the conquest of Egypt by the Greeks. They
used to nd the product of multiplications by repeatedly duplicating
the multiplicand. But since this duplication is nothing else but the
addition of the number to itself, we can say that for the Egyptians, before
the Ptolemies, there was no multiplication at all, only addition. However, since the enneadic system becomes `closed' for the operation of
174
D. K. Psychoyos
multiplication with 36 signs (i.e., exactly the same signs are repeated
afterwards as myriads), we cannot preclude that certain people in Egypt
knew and used the `Greek multiplication' before the advent of the
Greeks. But this is simply a logical hypothesis in so far as it is not supported by archaeological evidence.
As mentioned earlier, in order for the numeral system to work and to
enable people to carry out multiplications and divisions in the manner of
Greeks, there should have been 18, 27, 36, . . . signs, according to the size
of numbers that would have to be used. In reality, however, there should
have been 18, 27, 36, . . . positions, and the numbers occupying those positions should fulll the following relation: the ratio of the numbers occupying respective positions in two consequent enneads should be 10. There
should be, in other words, a relation similar to that of the digits
I
K
10
A B
Y
and
P S
10
I K
only that the positions of the digits should be occupied by the respective
numbers in any system, even the acrophonic system. Which means that,
theoretically speaking, it would be possible for the digit ( 900) to be
nonexistent, in which case its position would be occupied by the number
WP (800 100 900). As a matter of fact, it would also be possible for
Y, F, X, etc., (i.e., digits after [T 300]) to be nonexistent, and the positions corresponding to digits 400900 to be occupied by sums of digits
up to T: TP ( 400), TPP or TS ( 500), . . . TTTPPP or TSSS ( 900).
Though in this case multiplications in the Greek manner would be too
complicated: the mathematical elegance and eciency of the Milesian
system would have been destroyed, it would be better for one to follow
the time consuming primitive and simplistic Ègyptian' manner.
The Hebrews, since their alphabet had only 22 signs, used such a system before they adopted additional letters for their art of Cabbala, as we
shall see below.35 Indeed, given that among the signs of the triads (B, K,
S 2, 20, 200), (, X, X 6, 60, 600) etc., there do not exist any similarities which could help in carrying out calculations, the existence of 27 different signs to cover the 27 positions of the system is not absolutely necessary. But systems which make the best out of the principle of additivity
and restrict the number of their signs (usually to digits for 1, 5, 10, 100,
175
1,000), have to repeat them many times as, for example, in the Greek acrophonic, the Latin, the Sumerian or the Hieroglyphic systems of numbering. Such systems are in reality representations of abacuses by written
signs, they use the same units as the columns of an abacus and they do
not èncapsulate an operational capability,' as Ifrah (1998: 122) puts it.
There may emerge beautiful shapes for memorial inscriptions, but
they do not support mathematical intuition, in other words the creation
of new signs from the existing ones on the basis of the rules of mathematical reasoning, and they are exceptionally dicult to use in complex
calculations.
2.2.
The abecedaria as calculating machines
Whoever attempts to carry out calculations in the way described above is

bound to nd out immediately how easy the procedure becomes when she
has the abecedarium in front of her, so that she can locate the respective
signs by going up and down the enneads. It is reasonable therefore to assume that immediately after the `Pythagorean Table,' in other words the
multiplication of the pythmenes, students would learn to carry out multiplications with the digits of the tens and hundreds, using the abecedarium
arranged in enneads, exactly as in Table 2. For more experienced users,
the classication of the elements in enneads was perhaps superuous, but
the presence of the abecedarium would have been extremely useful for
locating the equivalents of the elements-digits. In a multiplication like
800 9, our reckoning in our own system would be somehow like this:
Eight hundred (800) times nine (9) is eight (8) by nine (9), carry two
zeroes (00) from 800. Eight (8) by nine (9) is seventy two (72); we add
the two zeroes, so seven thousand two hundred (7,200).
That is to say, the rst part, the nding of the intermediary result, is
based on the phonetic and visual similarity of the numeral signs (8,800),
but the nal result arises primarily from the visual similarity of `72,
7,200' and secondarily from the phonetic similarity of `seventy two, seven
thousand two hundred' as this may refer us also to `seven hundred,
seventy thousand, etc.' For the ancient Greek, there is a phonetic similarity òkto oktakosia' (8,800) that would guide her to nd all the pythmenes in one way, but there is no visual similarity between 800 and 8, since
800 is W and 8 is H. In the nal result, èpta khiliades diakosia' (7,200),
the phonetic similarity with èbdomekonta dyo' (72) has the same problems as in modern Greek èbdomekonta' refers one also to èptakosia,
176
D. K. Psychoyos
epta myriads' etc., and in no way is there any visual similarity between 72
and 7,200 (which the contemporary Arab-Indian numeral system shows)
since 72 is OB and 7,200 is 0 ZS. So there is no choice: either someone
remembers by heart èight hundred by nine equals seven thousand two
hundred,' so she writes down at once WY 0 ZS, or she writes something
like: WY HY OB 0 ZS. In the second case, which is the most typical since
the calculations are done with the pythmenes, multiplication becomes a
mechanical act of moving the nger or stylus over an abecedarium arranged
in enneads for the neophytes or, if the user is more expert, in one single
line.
On the basis of the above, it appears that a theory about the abecedaria
found in archaeological sites being used as help instruments to understand the numbers written in the Milesian system or even as `calculators'
for arithmetic, is more reasonable than the hypothesis that these abecedaria were used as aides for learning writing. Once the correspondence of
the names and forms of the elements was memorized, there was no need
for the abecedarium to be present during the act of writing. One would
need an abecedarium only in the early steps of learning writing, if she
could not remember the correspondence names sounds shapes: in
such a case, having it before her, she would recite the alphabet which she
had already learnt by heart, pointing to the letters one by one, so that
when she arrived at `lambda,' she would see for herself which shape it
corresponded to (Jeery and Johnston 1990: 25; Powell 1991: 22). The
knowledge of the alphabetic sequence with its xed order no doubt facilitates the process of learning, but it is not necessary for writing: one may
know the correspondence between the sounds and the forms of the letters
without knowing or having to recite the xed alphabetic order but this
order is absolutely necessary in order to understand the quantity a written
number represents.
All one needs for writing the vowel [o] is to know that it corresponds to
the written sign O, and it is of no consequence if it is in the fteenth or
sixteenth position in the alphabet. However, when one wants to do calculations, she must know the xed order, otherwise the numbers will not
correspond correctly: the order of the signs is of great consequence in
arithmetic, whereas their `word-names' have absolutely no signicance,
just as with the present-day system it is important for somebody to know
the form, the order of the digits 1, 2 . . . and the properties they have, and
not their names.36 For this reason English arithmetic is not dierent from
Greek: one can do mathematics without speaking but not without writing.
In any case, there is absolutely no acoustic relationship between the
names of the numbers and the names of the elements-digits (e.g., triakonta, L, lambda), and the names of the elements-letters do not inform
177
us about the logical connection between the elements-digits, that is to say

about their mathematical relationship: from their names (beta, kappa,
sigma) it is not at all apparent that the numbers B, K, S (2, 20, 200) are
ten times each other. In order to `see' these connections, we must have in
front of us an abecedarium.
Consequently, all those who were not mathematicians and who wanted
to transcribe numbers from one system to another (for example, from
Milesian to acrophonic and vice versa), or who needed more or less help
when they dealt with arithmetical calculations, all of them could have had
an abecedarium ready at hand, engraved by somebody else or by themselves on a wax tablet or some fragment of a vase that was of no further
use, or on some other material that would have been available in case of
emergency, that is when more complicated calculations were needed than
addition and subtraction, for which the abacus was ideal.37 With the conditions of contemporary education in mind and the well-known diculties that exist for pupils of even the last class of primary school to learn
the Pythagorean Table so as to carry out multiplications and divisions,
we could say that the abecedarium might be useful for writing words in
the rst and second classes of primary school, but it was essential for carrying out calculation, in secondary school, and even throughout one's
life.
We can therefore assume that some of the abecedaria that have been
found were intended for this use, if they happen to be abecedaria of 27
signs. The fact that they were discovered in the ruins of temples does not
automatically add magical or votive value to them, bearing in mind that
most abaci, the well-known instruments the ancient Greeks had at their
disposal in order to do arithmetical calculations, have also been discovered in temples. The abecedaria were in a way the `slide-rules' of antiquity
and we could call them `Milesian rules.'38
This hypothesis could probably answer the questions posed by Falsone
and Calascibetta (1991: 697): What was the use of the Greek (Ionic) abecedarium discovered in the Phoenician colony of Mozia (Western Sicily),
and who was its `writer'? The abecedarium is engraved on an ostracon
from a Samian amphora, at some point during the fth century, with
H and the last ennead missing and some elements in wrong places.
The superuous and are there, but all other letters after the latter
are missing. It is obvious that the abecedary is not decorative and the
humble ostracon, discovered on the site of a potter's workshop, cannot
be a votive object. A possible answer could be that someone, back then,
tried to understand a Greek number or to do calculations but the
results must have been disastrous, judging from the errors of the
abecedary.39
178
D. K. Psychoyos
2.3.
The forgotten art of isopsephy
It was mentioned a little earlier that the use of 0 A 0 Y for the thousands
in the `Milesian rule' allowed the Greeks to do calculations up till
M0 0 0 YY0 YY 9,999,999,999, which was probably sucient as a
limit for their practical needs, if we keep in mind that they could also
use very large ùnits of measurement,' multiples of the basic ones, like
the mina or the talent, equivalent to 100 and 6,000 drachmae respectively
(and apparently of Babylonian origin, since it was the sexagesimal system
that the Babylonians used). Archimedes undertook the task of looking
after the even larger numbers in his Psammite (Sandreckoner), the work
in which he tried to prove that he could create any number, as large as
he wanted. He chose as an example to calculate how many grains of
sand the ùniverse of Aristarchus' could hold, in the same way as physicists nowadays try to count how many protons make up the ùniverse
of Einstein.'40 The end result is an àstronomical' number: Archimedes
ended up by dening the order of magnitude of the number he cre n ariymo
n muriai
ated: Muriakiv muriostav periodou muriakiv muriosto
muria dev, that is to say of the order of 10 to the (8 10 16 ) power in our
own system. But again the grains which he counted the ùniverse of Aristarchus' would contain were not so many: they were hardly 10 64 , a number which should be compared with the 10 84 protons which physicists
count for the whole of the universe today, concluding that perhaps the
universe is not expanding too quickly.41
There were however other mathematicians with dierent calculating
interests: Apollonius for instance, who ourished at the end of the third
century BC, did not make his mark on the history of science only because
of his major work concerning conical sections, and for his mathematical
models with which he attempted to interpret the movement of the planets.
This great mathematician loved poetry no less than modern Hellenists,
and he showed it by setting this problem:
Given the verse:
APTEMIDOS KLEITE KPATOS EXOXON ENNEA KOYPAI 42
How much does the product of all its elements equal?
Trying to prove the superiority of mathematicians over the grammarians of the Alexandrine Museum could well be a sign of conceit
because as far as we know, no grammarian ever asked the question:
in what meter the proof of Apollonius' theorem is written, namely that
the section of a cone and a plane will be a circle or an ellipse, parabola
or hyperbola?
179
There is, however, in his gesture some other kind of conceit: Apollonius
makes matters more dicult concerning the noble and very ancient art
of isopsephy, which usually calculates something much more easily than
multiplication: Isopsephy is the art of nding the value of names, words,
phrases or verses, if we treat their elements-letters as if they were elementsdigits and sum them up.43 Leonidas of Alexandria (rst century AD) specialized in composing isopsephic epigrams with equinumeral distichs; that
is, epigrams of four lines, whose rst hexameter and pentameter, if their
letters' values were added, have the same arithmetical value with the
next two verses. The following is dedicated to Nero:
YYEI SOI TODE GPAMMA GENEYLIAKAISIN EN WPAIS
KAISAP NEILAIH MOYSA LEWNIDEW
KALLIOPHS GAP AKAPNON AEIYYOS EIS DE NEWTA
HN EYELHS YYSEI TOYDE PEPISSOTEPA44
Spartans have no reputation of literary exploits, but it seems that they
had the talent of combining poetry and mathematics via isopsephy: an example of isopsephic elegiac verses inscribed on marble was discovered in
Sparta, at the temple of Ortheia Artemis, coming from the second century
AD. It is a votive stele for a boy who won in a competition of singing,
and his father immortalised the son's victory in three verses, summing up
(for unknown reasons) to 0 BCL, that is 2,730.
OPYEIH DWPON LEONTEYS ANEYHKE BOAGOS 0 BCL
MWAN NIKHSAS KAI TADE EPAYLA LABWN 0 BCL
KAI M ESTECE PATHP EISAPIYMOIS EPESI 0 BCL45
This is not a case of just another of the very known `speaking object' of
the Greek antiquity but of `speaking digits,' which proclaims bravely their
hermaphrodite identity as double-faced `stoikheia,' stressing even for the
ignorant this subtle distinction, that they sum up to 2,730. Nikon Pergaminos `who had mastered all there was to know about geometry and
the science of numbers,' as described by his son, Glorious Galenos (the
renowned physician of the ancient world), was a master in composing isopsephic works.46 But the most famous creation of isopsephic art is, of
course, the Beast's Name in John's Apocalypse, whose we all know its
value to be XX (666), that is the triad (X, X, 600, 60, 6). There
have also been scholars who associate Homer and his works not with
elements-letters, as modern Hellenists do, but with elements-digits: this
concerns those who search for successive isopsephic verses in his works
180
D. K. Psychoyos
with poor results till now, it is true, even though today with computers
and easy statistics, there may be better results to be expected.47
Isopsephy is better known in the West under the name of Gematria
(from the Greek word `geometria,' geometry) as part of the Hebrew practice of Cabbala, and it has constructed a whole system for reading the
Old Testament, a system which acquired both fanatical supporters and fanatical opponents. The question is whether the extravagances of Hebrew
isopsephists may have pushed us to the other extreme: that we should forget that in the Greek texts, apart from elements-letters, there are probably
elements-digits as well.
So we should use the forgotten art of isopsephy a little, in order to see
whether it might help us to answer the questions, which arise when we
treat the elements of the Greek alphabet only as letters and not as digits.
3.
Archaeological evidence
Since the end of the nineteenth century, two opinions have been formed
concerning the emergence of the Milesian Numeral System: Josef Keil
considered that this system appeared after the middle of the sixth century
BC, his basic argument being that there is no epigraphic evidence showing the use of the Milesian Numeral System before that age, while from
the end of the eighth century on, all the letters (except ) have appeared
in various inscriptions. In other words, those who devised the Milesian
system (most likely from Doric Karia, according to Keil) brought back
to the existing 24 letter Ionic alphabet the Phoenician and (reviving
them from disuse) and added at the very end the , which is nothing else
than the Phoenician M (tsade), an element which occurred between P and
and which had fallen out of use with the Ionians but was used by the
Doriokares, and was incorrectly named sampi, most probably by the Byzantines.48 The other view was held by Wilhelm Larfeld, who claimed
that the system was created about two centuries earlier (end of the eighth
century), because at that time and were still being used by the Milesians in their inscriptions, while Y, F, X, C, W had already been added
at the end of the Phoenician alphabet.49 Since and were not used
in writing after 700 BC, and so they did not appear in the alphabetic sequence, it is highly improbable that they returned to their original places
to be used as digits: in such a case, they would have been placed at the
end, like tsade-sampi (M) which was useless to the Greeks and had already fallen out of use in the alphabetic sequence. Keil, in turn, based on
other evidence from inscriptions, claimed that it was impossible for and
W to have co-existed in the Ionic script (that is to say, had fallen out of
181
use before W was added) and that we should therefore concentrate on the
lack of evidence for Milesian numbers before the end of the sixth century.
He does not, however, explain why the `person' who decided to place
and back in their old positions, did not do the same for , which should
be placed between P and and not at the end. This debate continued
during the whole of the twentieth century, among many others, the two
best known epigraphic textbooks Jeery and Johnston (1990: 327)
and Guarducci (1967: vol. 1, 422) supporting the view of Keil and
Larfeld respectively, with certain amendments, of course, resulting from
more recent epigraphic data.
What has been said till now does not seem to add anything new to
the discussion concerning the invention of the Greek writing-numbering
system. In other words, it could be asserted that the Greeks simply borrowed their numeral system from the Egyptians but, wishing to avoid
the hieratic digits which were obscure and totally outside their tradition,
they used the already-existent phonetic alphabet instead, adding the necessary signs, be it only in an alphabet of 26 stoikheia, if we accept the
view of Larfeld, or , and in an alphabet of 24 stoikheia, if we accept
the view of Keil. It is obvious that Larfeld's view had logic on its side,
since it interprets the appearance of at the end of the series, but was
not supported by epigraphic evidence, while Keil's view had epigraphic
evidence on its side (there are not so old numbers written in the Milesian
way) but logic against it. Why should and return to their old positions and not as well? If we nally accept views such as that of Brixhe
(1982: 234235) and Slings (1998: 645), that is not tsade (the Greeks
never took it over into their alphabet) but it was a loan sign, possibly
from the Phrygian alphabet, then the inconsistency is removed: in that
case was correctly placed at the end of the alphabetic sequence, as an
entirely new sign, and it was perhaps correctly named sampi, even though
no one knows exactly what this word means. It seems logical in consequence to suppose that, about the middle of the sixth century, the Greeks
were beginning to employ the Egyptian system, using both for writing
numbers and for doing calculations the signs that they had already used
for writing words and composing phrases.
3.1.
Samos, Poseideion, Athens
Larfeld's view could not be easily accepted by modern scholars because

it is connected to another more important question: that of when the
Ancient Greeks invented their alphabet. Larfeld could suggest that the
Milesian System was devised in the eighth century, taking for granted
182
D. K. Psychoyos
that the Greek alphabet dated from the eleventh century. Since, however, the general agreement of Hellenists prevailed over a later emergence, about the beginning of the eighth century with Carpenter
(1933, 1938) placing it even later and with an accountant's accuracy
at 720 BC exactly a greater problem arose: now, the invention of
the Milesian System according to Larfeld almost coincided chronologically with the invention of the Ionic alphabet, the two systems became
one right from the very beginning, since they were identical with each
other. And the Hellenists were in no mind to be accused of being isopsephists or cabbalists. The elements-letters must have had chronological
and semantic priority over the elements-digits.
The discovery of the Abecedarium of Samos (Figures 1 and 2), which is
òne of the oldest if not the oldest of all the inscriptions from Ionia' (Young
1969; Slings 1998) denitively solved the question of when the Milesian
Numeral System became established, favouring the views of Larfeld and
Guarducci.50 It happens to be a complete abecedarium of 27 signs, which
is dated at 660 BC, and is engraved on fragments of a clay vessel (a cup).
It was discovered in a well for rubbish (apothetes) in Heraion amongst
various objects, which the priests had considered useless back then. The
well had been sealed in 640 B.C. (terminus ante quem) and the archaeologists Vierneisel and Walter (1959) who discovered the abecedarium, date
it twenty years earlier. Samos, the homeland of Pythagoras, perhaps not
the greatest but surely the most famous mathematician of all time, owed
this nd to the isopsephists. It raises new thoughts about the invention of
the Greek alphabet and its connection with the numeral system, which is
named after the homeland of the rst Greek mathematician and philosopher, Thales. Historiography attributes to Thales the Milesian, just as to
Pythagoras the Samian, Phoenician heredity.
As can be seen from Figure 1, the rst restoration of the grato by
Vierneisel and Walter in 1959 reached only as far as W and it was only
Figure 1. The Abecedarium of Samos ending at W (Vierneisel and Walter 1959; Guarducci
1967, 1987)
183
Figure 2. The Abecedarium of Samos ending at Sampi (Walter 1963; Jeery and Johnston
1990: plate 79)
in 1963 that the new publication by Walter (Figure 2) restored the real
form of this unique nd, whose signicance has been underestimated: numerous references, even recent ones, that is 3040 years after its publication, present the abecedarium as ending at W and not at .51
Setting eyes on this ancient abecedarium, the ardent isopsephist would
immediately claim that the use of the alphabetic sequence is, right from
the beginning, an arithmetic one. And this is because the in the Abecedarium of Heraion is the oldest known sampi in Greek inscriptions: all
the other appearances of in inscriptions are dated after 550 BC. The
use of it from then onwards is extremely limited: it has been located in
only ve inscriptions between 550450 BC, all of which come from Ionia
(Ephesus, Kyzikos, Teo, Erythraea, Halicarnassus) and with a phonetic
value [ss] which is noted in the same region by SS too.52 Later on, it disappears from texts and we come across it only in papyri and Byzantine
manuscripts as a numeral sign to which the Byzantines gave the name
sampi or `parakyisma,' that is of èctopic gestation'! But in reality, as has
been mentioned earlier in this paper, òf ectopic gestation' were rather the
redundant accents and aspers the Byzantines introduced in the Greek
writing system.
What was the doing in the abecedarium of a period when it was not
used in writing? The isopsephist would reply that, as it is not to be found
in inscriptions, grati or dipinti earlier than 550 BC, it cannot have been
used as an element-letter, but exists right from the beginning as an
element-digit in the Abecedarium of Samos; it subsequently acquires for a
short time the phonetic value [ss] which is soon abandoned, since that
value [ss] is expressed in another way, namely SS. ` did not have the
good luck of C!' the isopsephist will exclaim, convinced at the sight of
the abecedarium that the aim of the creators of the Greek alphabet was
that there should be 27 signs, to be used rst of all for the recording of
184
D. K. Psychoyos
numbers, and second for that of speech. About the end of the eighth century BC, some Greeks from Ionia with a deeper knowledge of Egyptian
mathematics decide to make use of it. They create (or adopt) the signary
of 27 elements, and use certain ones of these as letters (vowels and consonants) for recording speech. The inconsistencies, which exist in the selection of elements-letters, are due to this fact. Naturally, inscriptions earlier
than the Abecedarium of Samos but nevertheless including , may possibly be discovered but that will simply prove that the Greek alphabet
started with 27 letters, and the question whether that happened in order
to serve the needs of speech or of mathematics will remain unanswered.
The argumentum a silentio is at this moment in the isopsephists' favour.
The isopsephists however have more arguments on their side: apart
from the cases that Brixhe refers to, there are two more where the last
digit of the Greek numeral system is engraved on abecedaria. The rst
is the Abecedarium of Poseideion (Figure 3), which was discovered in
present day Poseidi of Cassandra in Chalkidiki, and dates back to 480
BC. The archaeologist who discovered it comments that it is à votive
abecedarium . . . all the Ionic alphabet is here and something more. At the
end, after W, a letter with three parallel projections which turn downwards
forms quite a rare case of the sampi.'53 Engraved on the base of an Attic
skyphos, the abecedarium begins as a straight, right-oriented line from
the centre towards the periphery, and on this horizontal line are the pythmenes, the rst ennead that is, except for Y, which did not t in. Then,
with Y rst, the other signs start to unfold peripherally and left-oriented,
but P is turning the wrong way round (it is written as if right-oriented)
and at a clear distance from , which has probably been squeezed in at
the base of the left part of P after the abecedarium was nished. Extremely untidy and unequal in size, the signs constitute a student's early
attempt at engraving the enneads A-Y, I-, and P- on a broken household vase in order to carry out arithmetical calculations, or so would
claim the ardent isopsephist. A milder isopsephist will perhaps insist that
we have before us the attempts of some student who has already been
taught the 24 elements-letters so as to read and write, and who is now
climbing the steps of the semiotic scale attempting to learn how to calculate. Or is it the work of some sciolist, who with his votive oering
wanted to persuade Poseidon that, apart from grammar, he knows arithmetic too?
The second example is the Abecedarium of Athens, which was discovered on the Acropolis during the excavations of 1866 and probably dates
to post 400 BC.54 It is engraved on a surface which is ideal for notes, on a
lead slate, the zealous isopsephist will point out what need do we have
of further evidence in order to conclude that it had been engraved to help
185
Figure 3. The Abecedarium of Poseideion (Bokotopoulou 1991)
perform arithmetical, or even geometrical calculations, if we bear in mind

that there are also some lines on the slate, together with the abc? Since the
abecedarium has been lost and there exists no other mention of it, I quote
the full description of it given by Pervanoglou, who recorded various
nds from the 1866 excavations on the Acropolis of Athens and published them in the Italian journal Bullettino dell'Istituto di Correspondenza
Archaeologica, (Pervanoglou 1867: 7383):
186
D. K. Psychoyos
. . . Ivi pure si rinvenne una lastra irregolare di piombo con diverse linee e le lettere
dell'alfabeto:
BGDEZHYIKLMNXOPPST . . . X
CW
posteriori probabilmente alla olimpiada 94, ove si pare strana l'ultima lettera e
percio la crediamo esser piuttosto numero (vedi Franz, Elementa, 349).55
The existence of this second abecedarium allows the isopsephists to

claim that in 403/402 BC, with the proposition of Archinus during Aeschines' archonship, the Athenians did not adopt 24 but 27 letters
that is to say, not only a writing system but also a numeral one once
again, the Ionic alphabet and the Milesian Numeral System are regarded
as one and the same.56 On the other hand, if the Athens' Abecedarium is
earlier than 400 BC, it most probably constitutes a useful tool for calculations since nobody in Attica at that time was obliged to know , X, W,
with the exception of those who wanted to transcribe numbers from
one system to another or to make dicult mathematical operations and
their task was not supported by the primitive acrophonic system.
Another two, very old abecedaria (Figures 4 and 5) which have been
discovered in the Agora of Athens (but which may have or have not
included because they are not complete) provide us with interesting
ndings. One of these, which dates back to the end of the eighth or the
beginning of the seventh century, in other words it belongs to the same
period as the Samos Abecedarium (Lang 1976: 7, plate 1, A1), presents
a part of the alphabetic sequence in two lines, of which the rst appears
Figure 4. Loomweight with two series of an incomplete abecedarium (Lang 1976: A1)
187
Figure 5. Ostracon with two series of stoikheia (Lang 1976: A2b)
to end in (a missing) Y and the second to start with (a missing) I just as

shown above in Table 2, only that the rst line is left-oriented. On the
other abecedarium, which is dated from the sixth century B.C., we notice
another two alphabetic sequences, where the second starts with a P under
the I of the rst series, as happens with the second and third line in Table
2 (Lang 1976: 7, plate 1, A2). On both of these abecedaria we nd ,
which is not used in Attic inscriptions (Jeery and Johnston 1990: 66,
69), but we cannot say whether the engraver(s) had included and , because the respective parts of the alphabetic sequence have not survived
(or they were not engraved in the rst place). In any case, the zealot isopsephist would insist, mainly because of the apparent arrangement of the
elements in enneads, that once again we have in front of us the ancient
Greek `slide rule,' that is the `Milesian Rule.'
Of exceptional interest from the point of view of the isopsephist is yet
another grato (Figure 6) which dates much later, from the fourth century BC, the period during which the use of the Milesian writing and numeral system was widespread.
The way it is read is perhaps indicative of the prejudice archaeologists
have against isopsephy: on the sherd is engraved the following sequence
SKBKBSK
approximately parallel with the signs
ABGD
while a little further there is an isolated
K
188
D. K. Psychoyos
Figure 6. Struggling with the triad (S, K, B) on a sherd (Lang 1976: A6)
According to Lang `this should probably be regarded as an alphabetic

exercise, perhaps with magical signicance' (Lang 1976: 7). But it is
more probably an arithmetical exercise of someone who, trying her hand
at the magic of multiplication, was struggling with the triad (S, K, B)
of (200, 20, 2): something like this would be the claim of the exultant isopsephist and it would be dicult for anyone to accuse her of unjustiable
enthusiasm.
There are, however, another four complete abecedaria, from dierent
places of Greece, which do not include and do not consist of 27 signs:
all these are decorative, painted on vases. The isopsephist will claim that
a potter or artist who had nothing to do with mathematics and arithmetical calculations (much less with grammar) drew them in order to impress
his (probably) uneducated customers. Which educated Boeotian (ìf there
was even one such person!', the spiteful Athenian would add) would put
in her lounge, in 420 BC, the cup which Jeery and Johnston presents
(1990, plate 10, 20) a cup with two alphabetic sequences without X,
which nevertheless dier in the last signs after X? In the same way, in
an abecedarium from Metapontium (475450 BC [Jeery and Johnston
1990: plates 50, 19]), which is drawn on a clay `stamnos,' the potter has
added two similar elements (XX) at the end: he knew, therefore, that
something should be there, though not exactly what. Neither does this
abecedarium have a X. Guarducci (1967: vol. 1, 449) clearly states that
the above-mentioned abecedaria are decorative ones. The last complete
abecedarium is drawn on an ancient Corinthian aryballus (Jeery and
189
Johnston 1990: plates 74, 24): the vessel is crudely made and badly
drawn, according to Amandry and Lejeune (1973), and at the end of the
abecedarium there are certain incomprehensible signs. The name `Troilus,' is also written on the aryballus and spelt strangely. Obviously, the
artisan was not very successful either with letters or with crafts.
It could be therefore claimed that for the engraved, ergo functional
abecedaria, we have clear evidence that they were intended for mathematical use, whereas for the painted, decorative abecedaria, we are unclear
about the number and kind of their elements, a fact which is due most
probably to the painter's ignorance. Unfortunately for the isopsephists,
there is an abecedarium dating from the fth century BC circularly engraved on a sherd that was found in the Agora of Athens. This one includes but it ends with W (Lang 1976: plate I, A3). Since it is not complete, we do not know if ever existed. Of course, one cannot nd the W
in an abecedarium in Attica 50 or even 100 years before the Ionic system
was adopted, nor is there any justication other than the engraver's ignorance for the fact that before W there is a letter which is probably a badly
written F, that is to say C is missing. Here, however, grammarians and
mathematicians give up.57
3.2.
Cumae and Corinth
Yet another example that brings the art of isopsephy to interesting conclusions is the engraving on the Lekythos of Cumae (Figure 7), which
dates from the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the seventh.
It is one of the oldest Greek inscriptions if it is Greek, because certain scholars claim that it is Etruscan (Dubois 1993: 3640; Jeery and
Johnston: plate 18, number 2). The grato, which runs around the edge
of the base of this Protocorinthian lekythos, is as follows:
HISAMENETINNYNA
Some followers of the Greek interpretation read the inscription as
`hisa mene tin nuna,' and interpret it as èxpect the same now,' that is èxpect the same fortune' you who opened the grave, since the lekythos is
a funeral gift. But the rough aspirate on `hisa' poses a problem, along
with the non-existent `nuna,' which is interpreted as `nun' formed on the
analogy of èita' (Lejeune 1946: 102). For this reason Dubois (1995: 39)
reads `hIs(s)amene, tin nuna' (where `hIssamenov' is the àncien participe sigmatique aoriste moyen [of istamai], a accent nale, inconnu certes
a ce jour' and is formed on the analogy of the words Alexamenov,
190
D. K. Psychoyos
Figure 7. The grati on the base of the proto-Corinthian lecythos of Cumae (Jeery and
Johnston 1990: plate 18; Dubois 1995: 36)
Sthsamenov, Orwhsamenov etc.): `Hissamenos, for you from now on,'

she translates. In this way she solves the problem of the rough aspirate
with the word ìstamai,' but the problem of `nuna' remains. Cassio
(1991), cited in Dubois (1995), links this with `tin,' creating the otherwise
unknown form `tinnunai' of the verb `tio,' so that the grato according
to him takes on the meaning of ìt is fatal to pay back somebody in the
same coin' (ìl est fatal de payer la meme chose') but the problem of the
rough aspirate remains.
The art of isopsephy would suggest that we should read the exceptionally simple phrase:
191
H ISA MENE TIN NYN A

òkto isa mene, tin nun en', `wait for 8 similar ones, now (there is) one
for you' in other words, the sender is informing the recipient of the
lekythos that from the present dispatch of lekythoi (or loads of lekythoi,
or maybe other goods, the lekythos being a gift) only one is his and he
should wait for another eight of the same. This version is perhaps supported by the fact that on the base of the same lekythos there are two
àbecedaria' engraved in the center, which present various problems as to
the order of the signs and as to which signs exactly are included. But in
any case, they do not reach beyond H, which is also questionable as it
appears in a position where it should not really be that is, before Z.
Those eager supporters of the isopsephic art would claim that in reality
some arithmetical calculations were being carried out on the abecedaria,
concerning H (8), but apart from their conviction, they would not have
any other valid arguments to put forward. If, however, they are right
about the initial H 8 and the nal A 1 in such an old inscription,
which would mean that at the two ends of the Greek world, Cumae in
the West and Samos in the East, the Milesian Numeral System was already in use from the beginning of the seventh century, then the rest of
us too can assume that the development of letters and digits proceeded
from the very start side by side.
The isopsephists would also insist that apart from Boegehold's suggestion (1992) there are other readings of the grato that was found in the
Ancient Agora of Corinth on an Attic sherd and is placed in the sixth
century B.C. (Figure 8):
Figure 8. The sherd from Corinth (Boegehold 1992)
192
D. K. Psychoyos
YYEWN
GAPOZEI
EPIDOTE
GAP
Boegehold reads: Ìn fact it smells of sacrices. Yes, add 3to it4.' But
even he is baed by the phrase he suggests, which reminds one of a dialogue from an Attic comedy and it is not at all understandable why
two people who are quite close enough to enjoy the sweet scent of the
`sacrices' would have exchanged notes in order to communicate. But
the isopsephists interrupt again: there is also the reading
OY EWN
GA P OZEI
EPIDOTE
GA P
in other words, in the Doric dialect (where GE becomes GA): Òf
the 470 eeces, one hundred smell! So, send one hundred again!'58 Isopsephists familiar with shepherds and the like know quite well that if the
skins (EWAI) of sheep, goats, etc., do not dry out well in the sun and
are instead packed up too soon, they rot, spoil, and, of course, smell.
Therefore someone who received 470 diphtherae, in all likelihood in order
to use them as writing material, either for the Homeric epics or for geometric theorems, is protesting to the supplier about the goods he sent and
asks him to replace the rotten skins.
It is obvious, nevertheless, that the isopsephists, despite their zeal, are
not meant to achieve much. They will not be able to nd easily numbers
that come to us from the antiquity: calculations demand surfaces which
are easy to use and easy to erase, and swift styli. We are never likely to
nd multiplications or calculations of square roots chiseled out on marble. We will not nd subtractions painted on vases or additions immortalised on silver or gold slates. Arithmetical calculations took place on
wax or sand or on lead slates or even on a tile that happened to be lying
nearby at the dicult moment when something had to be counted and
calculations to be carried out urgently just like the ostraca with the
Arpedonaptes' calculations of the land in Egypt. The multi-paged tables,
like those of the papyrus Rhind, where with the aid of unit fractions
are calculated the `parts' 2 : N (where N 3; 5; 7; 9 . . . 101), which are
useful for doing divisions, or the tables with the squares of various
decimal numbers, or with the products of the sexagesimal numbers all
of these, in order to be of any use, must have been written on papyrus or
193
parchment.59 Only the Pythagorean Table and the abecedaria of 27 elements would have been able to aord a somewhat luxurious and permanent surface, owing to their small dimensions and enormous signicance
and as to the abecedaria, the cup of Samos could serve as a proof.
Therefore, only crude, rough engravings on potsherds or lead slates can
vindicate the isopsephists. But who will be convinced that the grato
COI
that is found on the fragment of a vase from the beginning of the fth
century BC, records in the Milesian Numeral System the multiplication
700 70 10? And will he, in so doing, reject Lang's interpretation
(1976: plate 12, F25), which skips the problem of the presence of C at
such an early period in Attica, reading it as `non Attic chi' and interpreting the three letters as initials of the name JOIRILOS? And why would
some others, apart from the ardent isopsephists, accept that the grato
SKI
similarly found on a humble sherd from the fourth century BC (Lang
1976: plate 13, F70) is 200 20 10 and not the beginning of the name
SKIRWNIDHS, as Lang claims? Even more so, it will be exceptionally
dicult for anyone to accept that the
BLE
(Lang 1976: plate 11, F17), which she makes out on a grato of the late
sixth century, is a misreading. If some isopsephist (an extreme one, maybe) had been the rst to study the sherd, she would have guessed that the
L is nothing but <, that is the sign for 12 , she would have read the E as
F ( ), and she would naturally have come to the conclusion that she had
in front of her the fundamental equality for the calculation of fractions
B<F
that is 23 12 16 (van der Waerden 2000: 7), as naturally as the grammarian who would have seen the beginning of the name BLEPYPOS or
something equivalent. And since epigraphists are constantly diagnosing
lapsus calami on grati and inscriptions, why should the isopsephist not
diagnose a mistake in calculations on the sherd with the signs
YHOG
194
D. K. Psychoyos
(Lang 1976: plate 12, F55) from the early fth century, which represents
the product of 9 by 8 a tough one, as we all know since our school
years. Is it 72 or 73? The latter, i.e.,
Y H OG (sic)
was the one chosen by the little Athenian, perhaps a fellow-student to
Perikles' or Plato's grandfather, and his mistake was recorded for all eternity. Lang, however, prefers to see here the misspelled beginning of the
engraved name YHOGENHS, with H where there should have been E,
or EI, as she herself notes miscalculation or misspelling?
The task of the isopsephist is thankless. Especially if she has visited the
Epigraphic Museum of Athens and has been overwhelmed by the huge
volumes of words chiseled on marble, words that are kept there and that
will survive for thousands of years to come; words that have nothing to
do with numbers and calculations, but commemorate instead military victories, loved ones who died, young men about to do their military service,
or treaties between cities. But when our isopsephist visits Athens' Acropolis, she gets her courage back: Parthenon has been erected and has been
able to survive, to stay upright for so many centuries fascinating us with
its beauty, only because millions of forever lost calculations have been
performed in order to build it successfully probably some of them
with the Abecedarium of Acropolis, if it is not as late as Pervanoglou
thinks.
What matters if these very few signs, these fragmented messages from
the Athenian Agora, are read that way or the other? The major issue lies
in the relationship of digits and letters, of words and numbers: did the alphabet come into being in order to serve speech, with its mathematical use
coming second, or did it come into being in order to serve what could not be
spoken, that is numbers and mathematical calculations, and its grammatical
use followed? Or could the two have been combined right from the beginning? In order to investigate further this crucial question, we must leave
the Greek space behind us and extend our search into Time.
4.
In the vicinity of the magical KZ and L
Decades ago, there had been a controversy between the Hellenists as to

the exact time when the Greeks took over, modied and adopted the
Semitic writing system. The majority of them sustained that the transition took place before 1,000 BC, but after the 1930s, however, and the
work of Carpenter (1933, 1938), the Hellenists gradually reached general
195
agreement and nowadays most of them accept that this took place at the
end of the ninth century or the beginning of the eighth, about 800 BC.60
Some Orientalists, especially Naveh (1987, 1991) again insist that this
event should be placed during the second millennium BC, in any case
before the formation of the Phoenician alphabet (about 1,100 BC). This
means that the Greek alphabet is of Semitic origin, but older than the
Phoenician one. Naveh's arguments are based on the shape of the Greek
letters and the direction of writing: they remind older scripts, earlier than
the Phoenician, which are generally labelled `Proto-Canaanite' from
Canaan, the Promised Land of the Hebrews; an area which, for the Orientalists dealing with the question of writing, includes the whole of present day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and part of Syria.61 In other words,
roughly from Sinai to the Orontes estuary and the Gates of Cilicia, at a
distance of 50100 kilometers inlands from the Mediterranean. And although the ancient Greeks had no doubt that their letters were `phoenike
ia,' the terms `Foinikev' and `Foinikh' were used loosely and corresponded to what, according to the Orientalists, is described as `Canaan.'
On their part, the Hellenists put forward the strong àrgument of silence,'
the argumentum a silentio: there have not been found in Greece proper
examples of alphabetic script which date earlier than 720 BC (Oenochoe
of Dipylon, Attica), nor before 750 BC in Magna Grecia (Nestor's Cup,
Pithekoussai), and it seems dicult for this gap of about four Dark Centuries between the tablets of the Syllabic Linear B and the phonetic alphabet to be bridged with new archaeological nds of alphabetic scripts.62
4.1.
One thousand years, one thousand miles and maybe more
From the viewpoint of this paper, what matters is that among the Orientalists who were involved in the question of `Proto-Canaanite' writing systems, the prevailing opinion is that its very beginnings are traced back to
the eighteenth century BC and its end is placed in the twelfth century,
with the emergence of the Phoenician system which was fundamental to
later developments.63 This was so because (apart from the South-Arabic
system, considered to have broken away from the Proto-Canaanite system earlier, in the fourteenth century) the remaining Semitic systems subsequently originated from it that is the Phoenician script. From these,
scores of other Asiatic writing systems evolved and, according to prevailing opinions of Hellenists, the Greek one too and from the Greek the
European ones. All the systems of writing that exist in our world today
originate either from the Proto-Canaanite or the Chinese systems, with
very few exceptions.
196
D. K. Psychoyos
The Proto-Canaanite constitutes the rst known appearance of an alphabetic system (a consonantal one, or àbjad,' since there are only signs
for the consonants), that is, a system which attempts to record simple phonemes in order to render human speech phonetically and not words,
syllables or other clusters od sounds, as in the Egyptian, or AssyroBabylonian systems, in the Cretan scripts, etc. The oldest examples of this
script have been discovered mainly in Sinai and Negev (Proto-Sinaitic
inscriptions), areas close to Egypt. Following Albright (1966), many Orientalists (e.g., Puech 1986; Naveh 1987) maintain that the system was
based on a consonantary with 27 signs. Naveh is clear in his conclusions
about the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, the rst Semitic consonantary:
1)
2)
it was invented c. 1700 by Canaanites who had some knowledge of

Egyptian writing.
the number of letters representing the consonantal system was
initially twenty-seven. By the thirteenth century it was reduced to
twenty-two. (Naveh 1987: 42)
It is also a commonplace among Orientalists that the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit, is a transcription of an original Semitic linear consonantary,
with another 3 signs added at the end of it, of which two were vowels
of some kind (alef i and aleph u) and the last one [ss] was used for recording foreign words.64 The Ugaritic system of 27 3 signs derives from
the fourteenth century BC and was `cuneiform' (with only formal relation
to the Sumero-Babylonian logosyllabic cuneiform) because of the writing
materials used (clay and reed), while for the original linear version of the
27-signs consonantary it is supposed that papyrus, sherd or skins were
used as supports and that is the reason we do not have any remnant.
There is evidence that in Ugarit and other places there coexisted two cuneiform alphabets: the `long' one with 27 3 letters and a `short' one
with fewer letters, maybe 22. That means that one and the same sign
was used to note sounds that were noted with 2 dierent letters of the
long alphabet. So, support is also lent to the view that there were two linear signaries with 22 and 27 letters respectively, which coexisted, and thus
two coexisting alphabetic traditions much like the 24 and 27 letters'
tradition of the Greeks. If we accept this argument and given the existence of two more signs in the Ugaritic alphabet used as `vowel signs'
(alef i and aleph u), while the original aleph is used as aleph a,
then the number of vowels plus matres lectionis grows to six. Moreover,
according to the view of Naveh, the last element of the Ugaritic alphabet
had the phonetic value [ss], the same value with the last element of the
Greek alphabet, that is , sampi.65
197
Thus, the hypothesis that the Ionian Greeks do not àdd' signs to the
Phoenician consonantary of 22 signs, but adopt and modify an existing system of 27 signs, cannot be a priori rejected. We do not have to assume that
it took place during or before the thirteenth century BC, when the 27 3
sign cuneiform signary existed for sure: the coexistence of the `long' and
`short' Semitic alphabets may have continued its underground course until 750 BC, a date when the rst examples of Greek writing come from.66
Naveh (1987: 42, 177) believes that the looseness relating to the direction of writing, which can be, just as in Proto-Canaanite as in ancient
Greek, left-oriented, right-oriented, boustrophedon, from top to bottom
or from bottom to top alternately, is due to the `pictographic' perception
the users had of the letters and he follows Jerey and Johnston (1990:
46) on this point. Yet, as we saw earlier, the digits in the additive system
can also be placed here and there, since their position does not aect the
result of the calculations in the case of addition. To discuss `the perpetuation of the pictographic perception' of writing two thousand years after
its invention, when in fact it is questionable whether this perception existed right from its Sumerian beginnings, poses a real danger, greater perhaps than the dangers to which the isopsephists are exposed.67 Besides,
there is a problem with Naveh's interpretation: the Greeks had adopted
an old and not as yet stabilized form of letters, whereas the Phoenician
letters had become stabilized by the ninth century. Why aren't the Greek
letters stabilized even after the passage of a number of centuries equivalent to the Phoenician ones not necessarily in the same forms, but at
any rate in xed forms of writing? Why is it that for about 500 years the
Greeks are struggling with writing boustrophedon while the Phoenicians
have abandoned it?
In any case, is it not a little strange that in Sinai in 1700 BC, in `Canaan'
in 1400 and also in Samos in 700, that is, in the span of 1,000 years and
within a space of 1,000 miles, 27 signs are needed to record the speech of
dierent peoples who were speaking entirely dierent languages? Even if
we reject the Sinai hypothesis of a 1700 BC consonantary with 27 letters
(because it is not independent from the fact that the Ugarit signary had
27 elements, see note 56), the question arises of the relation between the
real 27 stoikheia (elements) Ionian alphabet of 700 BC and the generally
accepted as existing 27 letter Semitic consonantary of 1400 BC.
The question cannot be dismissed because the area covered by 27 sign
alphabets is much more extended. Towards the other end of the Mediterranean, beyond Fretum Herculeum, on the Southwest corner of
the Iberian Peninsula, there have existed a signary of 27 elements used
by the people who created the `Tartessian Culture' named after the city
of Tartessus, which some ancient writers identify with Atlantis. The
198
D. K. Psychoyos
Figure 9. The Abecedarium of Espanca (De Hoz 1991)
language is unknown, the script is named `Tartessian' or `South Lusitanian' because of inscriptions found in the South of Portugal. There is a
controversy between scholars whether the signary is of Greek or Phoenician origin, because of the presence of vowels among its signs and even
of the Y just after T. The rst thirteen signs are Phoenician (or Greek)
and the other fourteen are local inventions (De Hoz 1991; Ramos 2000).
According to specialists, the system has the peculiarity of possessing signs
for vowels, consonants, and syllables at the same time. But from the isopsephic point of view what matters is that a slate has been found with an
abecedarium of 27 signs engraved on it two abecedaria, the second being a replica of the rst, just for isopsephists to make sure that it is not an
accidental line of signs (Figure 9).68 Also, that some of the elements are
`frozen,' dead letters not used in epigraphy just as , and in
Greece. The slate was discovered among the stones of a farmyard at Espanca (near Sete, Municipality of Castro Verde, Region of Beja, Portugal), at the heart of the Iberian Pyrite Belt, at the upper course of Guadiana river, near the greatest modern mine of copper in Europe (Neves
Corvo), and in the same region where intensive metallurgy of silver was
taking place, at least between the end of the eighth century BC and the
middle of the sixth century BC (Kassianidou 1993). The Abecedarium of
Espanca is not dated but it is surely earlier than the fth century BC. Of
course, there is no indication for a mathematical use of the 27 elements of
Espanca but meeting again the same number of signs, for an entirely
199
dierent writing system, for a language entirely unrelated, is a rather

strange coincidence.
4.2.
Sounds and the Procrustes' Bed of numbers
The story of 27 does not end here: the Hebrews too saw to it, that the
signs of their alphabet were 27 when, during the third to second century
BC, at the end of the sequence of the 22 signs of `Square Hebrew' which
they had inherited from Aramaeans, they placed gradually ve additional
forms of the letters kaf, meme, nun, pe, tsade, which are used when these
letters appear at the end of the word. In this way, they would have been
able to practice better in their own isopsephy, the Gematria, seeing that
the classic Semitic alphabet of 22 signs only goes up to 400; with these
ve nal forms they had the ve missing signs for the sequence 500, 600,
700, 800, 900 and so they too acquired a signary of 27 stoikheia. The
historians of mathematics insist that these nal forms were used as digits
also.69 The fact is that the new signs are exactly the number the isopsephists would like.
The Copts (that is, the Egyptians of the Ptolemaic, Roman and Arabic
times) were to abandon the hieroglyphics and the hieratic Egyptian writing with its complex consonantal clusters around the third to second century BC, and to adopt completely the Greek (Ionic) alphabet with its 27
letters which were also used as digits together with some additional
signs from the old `demotic' Egyptian writing system, in order to express
some particular phonemes. It should be noted that `many of these borrowed letters do not correspond to Coptic phonology, which has neither
d nor z; does not distinguish k from g . . . Standard written Coptic (Sahidic dialect) has 21 phonemes.'70
It has already been mentioned that at some point in the seventh or
eighth century AD, another 6 letters were added to the existing Arabic alphabet of 22 letters, in order to enrich it with signs which were necessary
for denoting some sounds which had not been recorded until then in writing the Arabic language. That is what linguists claim, but how necessary
were they when their frequency in the text of the Qur'an is 4.0% all in all?
The ve new letters of the Greek alphabet (Y, F, X, C, W) had a total
frequency of 8.9% in the Homeric texts. The most successful of the six
new Arabic letters (dhaal) has a frequency of appearance of 1.6% and another two (ghayn, Zaa 0 ) have only 0.3%0.4% and naturally occupy the
last places in the table of frequencies, as in Appendix B. At all events,
those concerned with the history of numbers prefer to believe that the addition of those letters at the end of the Arabic abjad probably took place
200
D. K. Psychoyos
in order to facilitate the numeral system (Ifrah 1998: 242): with the
rst ve additional signs they completed the ennead of the hundreds
up to 900, just like the Hebrews, and the last digit was used for 1,000
possibly in order to denote, with some diacritical signs upon it, the ennead of the thousands (1,0009,000) without repeating the blunder of the
Greeks who, as mentioned above, used in certain cases for the same reasons the sign (900) in the form A , B , . . . Y .
It is of interest for us to note that the elements of the Arabic alphabet
have greater stability as digits than as letters. At some point the Arab
grammarians decided to change the order of the signs, grouping them according to their form, and so moved the six new ones near to other, preexisting signs, to which they were related in terms of form. All the letters
however kept their old arithmetical values, probably because there would
have been great confusion with the already recorded numbers. Thus, the
alphabetic sequence is not an arithmetical one as well, as can be seen in
the table in Appendix B. If, however, the numbers are placed in the positions which the mathematicians had provided before the grammarians reshued them, we will nd once again the old Phoenician and Aramaic
sequence, which the Arabs call abjad, after its initial elements, alif, ba,
jim, dal: but this sequence exists only in digits now. More specically, it
existed till the age when the Arabs did huruf al jumal, that is àdditions
with letters'; until they too went on to use Àrabic' numbers the numbers which, as everybody knows, are Indian.71
The use of 27 signs in the alphabets as digits branched out beyond the
domain of the Greeks and the Semites, that is beyond the civilizations of
the southeastern Mediterranean. In the middle of the fourth century AD,
Bishop Wullas created the Gothic writing system, wishing to translate
the Bible into Gothic and thus Christianize the Visigoths. That system
included 27 signs with the well-known arithmetical values of the three
enneads. Of these signs, two did not have any phonetic value (they were
used in order to translate not divine words but only divine numbers) and
they served only to indicate 90 and 900, according to the example of
and in Greek (Gamkrelidze 1994; Ebbinghaus 1996).72 During roughly
the same period, Christianity spread to the Eastern ends of Europe, the
Caucasus. In the middle of the fourth century the Asomtavruli, the rst
Georgian Writing System was created, so that the word of the Lord
would save the souls of the Georgians. But the unknown creator of this
system believed that such a gift deserved sacrices: his system would
have 36 elements, four enneads. Naturally, all these signs were also
digits apart from being letters, with the additional ennead expressing the
numbers 1,0009,000. Together with Christianity then, the ages old numeral system of the Pharaohs made its way to Georgia (Holisky 1996;
201
Gamkrelidze 1994). Fifty years later, the year 406 AD in neighbouring

Armenia, the inventor of the Armenian writing system, a clergyman
called Mesrop Mashtots, would be of the same mind: that reading the
sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity in the national language of the
Faithful was worth the eort of memorising 36 signs, which had of course
the same arithmetical values in the corresponding positions of the
enneads as they had had in the period when the Pyramids were constructed (Sanjian 1996; Gamkrelidze 1994). Four hundred and fty years
later, the monk Constantine-Cyril would ascribe to that when, together
with his brother Methodius, he set out to enlighten the Slavs of Morava:
the dissemination of the Divine Word was worth memorising new signs.
Thus, in the year 860 he created the rst Slavic alphabet, the Glagolitic
regardless of the fact that the name `Cyrillic' was later mistakenly given
to another alphabet, the Bulgarian modication of the Glagolitic. Of
course, this alphabet had 36 elements, so that the Egyptian enneads
would spread in the hinterland of the Balkans too, along with the Word
of Lord (Cubberley 1996; Gamkrelidze 1994).
Linguists and philologists disagree as to whether the form of such and
such a sign, which the above `Christian alphabets' adopt, comes from
Greek, Aramaic or Runic scripts, or is just invented by its creators. Yet,
the fact that the number of signs nally arrives at exactly 27 or 36 signs
does not surprise anyone not even Gamkrelidze (1994) who, as far as
I know, is the only one to persist in pointing out that these Christian alphabets with 27 or 36 letters which also function as digits, can express
numbers as well. He accepts that ìn such a system the graphic symbols
number 27 or 36 . . . 27 symbols where the number of phonetic units designated in writing is less or equal to 27 and 36 graphic symbols where the
number of phonetic symbols designated in writing exceeds 27' (Gamkrelidze 1994: 26). Yet, to him, their main morphologic similarity is not
this isopsephic characteristic, but (apart from their alphabetic and not
consonantal-syllabic nature) the fact that they follow the pattern of the
Greek alphabet as to the form of certain letters which represent similar
sounds or as to the position of the letters in the alphabetic sequence
while the predominant characteristic of Christian alphabets is that they
are èxpanded' (or perhaps `squeezed') in such a way as to meet the needs
of mathematics as well, unless one sustains that they meet only the need of
the Faithful for XX, the Number of the Beast in the Apocalypse, to be
transcribed in their own writing.
Linguists do not seem to worry for the consequences of the fact that
the inventors of these systems arranged the number of letters so as to
be exactly 27 or 36, as the Greeks did by adopting the entirely useless
X and C and incorporating the `dead letters' , , and . However,
202
D. K. Psychoyos
Gamkrelidze mentions three examples from the ancient alphabet of his

homeland, Georgia, which I nd interesting: the letter he, with the arithmetical value of 8, which corresponds to the Greek H, has the phonetic
value of a diphthong [ei], which could have been rendered with the existing [e] [i] that is to say, we have a redundant sign, just as in the case
of the Greek X [ ks]. Not that things could not be worse: according to
Gamkrelidze (1994: 57, n. 40, 62, n. 44, 9293), in the beginning, when
the Asomtavruli was created, the signs zan ( 90) and hae ( 900) did
not have any phonetic value, but were èpisemata' just as the Byzantines
called , , and . They obtained phonetic value ([z 0 ] and [h]) when the
corresponding phonemes èntered the Georgian language some centuries
later' and since there were available elements, they incorporated them
into writing too. Someone may, however, raise the question: is it possible
that the very existence of the two signs created the phonemes? Could
mathematics have made the language conform to its own rules? Even if
the answer to these questions is negative, the question `would the new
phoneme /z 0 / (introduced from a foreign language) have had survive in
Georgian language, if there were not an empty place for it in the alphabet?' is more dicult to answer.
Let us look at some examples where a specic writing system (and not
writing in general) may have exerted some inuence on the Greek language. If X had not been established as the sign for the cluster [ks], would
the diversied use of the preposition èk' (ek) before a consonant and èx'
(ex, that is eks) before a vowel have come into general use in the Greek
language? The Liddel-Scott dictionary claims that in inscriptions this
division is not absolute, in other words, initially èx' could have existed
before a consonant too, and along that there could have been the forms
èw' and èg' or ès' or even è.' But in the written tradition of later times,
brought about by manuscripts edited by grammarians, the rule èx
vowel' and èk consonant' is absolute, just as in the Modern Greek language. Would it be the same, I wonder, if there were no X and the preposition were written èkv' or ègv'? Would not the forms èg,' èw,' and èv'
have been preserved too in order to represent the èk,' which acquired a
monopoly? What about all these words which start with the intensive or
privative `xe-' (xebajo, xeyarreuo, etc.) and which, according to Andriotis' Etymological Dictionary, come from the `past progressive and
past simple tenses of the verbs that start with `èk'', owing to the change
of k into x (ekbajo exebajon xebaja)?' (Andriothv, 1988, 236). To
what extent has all this happened as a result of `phonetic rules,' changes
in speech, and not due to the demand that the sign X should play its ùnitary' semiotic role in the language as well, even though the isopsephists
claim that it was placed in the alphabet purely for mathematical reasons?
203
If Y had not been created and the confusion with the already existing
had not been caused, would the strange general rule have been established, that all Greek words beginning with Y are aspirated `for reasons
which are not always clear' (Allen 2000: 90)? A rule which, in turn,
caused the prevalent change of T, P, K to Y, F, X in the well-known
cases of compound words where the rst part consists, for example, of
prepositions like apo, epi, anti, upo etc., and the second is a word, which,
for reasons which are not clear, is considered as aspirated because it begins with Y.73
In conclusion, we can assume that all these alphabets were put on Procrustes' Bed so that their signs would come to 27 or 36 exactly, since we
discover in the Greek case the existence of episemata, phonetically dead
letters (, , ) or redundant ones (X, C, Z). However, to conclude denitely on the question about other alphabets than the Greek one, we
should have statistics of the frequencies of their letters in the sacred texts,
which they were created to transcribe, and we should know if they express
single or compound phonemes, that is phonemes which could have been
expressed by digraphs (or trigraphs). Naturally, with the appearance and
establishment of the Arabic Numeral System, mathematicians had no
further reasons to press grammarians to adapt the alphabets to their own
demands.
4.3.
A little more of isopsephy
It was mentioned above that X is a redundant sign in the Greek alphabet.

It could also be represented as KS or XS, and in any case it is an exceptionally rare letter. Yet this letter was used by Kircho about 120 years
ago in order to classify the Greek alphabets with colour codes still in use
today: the `blue' ones where X ( 60) exists and represents the sound [ks]
and where X ( 600) represents [kh], and are mostly alphabets of Eastern
Greece, above all the Ionic one. `Red' refers to those that do not have X
in the extant inscriptions, but use X in order to represent [ks], while for
the sound [kh] the sign C is used. These include the alphabets of Western
Greece, from which the Etruscan alphabet derived, and from that the
Latin one for that reason X represents the sound [ks] in most European languages. Finally, there are also the `green' ones, which are, moreover, considered to be the most ancient and which have neither C nor X,
nor any of the additional signs (those after T) except Y.
It is interesting that, even though X does not appear in inscriptions, it is
however included in the seventh century abecedaria which have been discovered in Etruria and are considered Greek `red' ones. In addition, the
Phoenician sign M (tsade), which does not exist in Eastern alphabets,
204
D. K. Psychoyos
appears there between P and . We cannot claim that those signs of letters have respective arithmetical values, because the extant Etruscan abecedaria have 26 and not 27 signs, which is unfortunate as far as the views
expressed here are concerned.74 They all stop at C, and the characteristic
Ionic signs W and are missing from their end. In any case, if they have
an arithmetical value, then with the insertion of M (tsade), which owing
to its position has a value of 90, must be 100 and P 200 that is to
say, the numerical value of the signs rises by 100, and X would have
the value of 700. However, in these abecedaries we notice that the wellknown order of the signs changes: the signs F and X alternate their positions so that the sign X retains the same arithmetical value, 600. The retention in the alphabetic sequence of the sign X 60, which is not used in
writing, and the change in order for X so that it is 600 (if it has an arithmetical value), is of exceptional interest to the isopsephists: 60 and 600
are the basic numbers of the sexagesimal Babylonian numeral system,
just as 10, 100, 1.000 in our decimal system. However, there is also the
third digit of the triad (6, 60, 600), the pythmen . The name `digamma'
(two gammas, that is `2 G') for is supposed to derive from the form F,
one of the two usual shapes of the sign the other being a square-shaped
C (that is which has been used here) the form which naly prevailed
through Byzantium till today. And in any case nobody thought of calling
`trigamma' the E, which later was labelled èpsilon.' Therefore, is it not
possible that it was called `digamma,' because it is two gammas in a
more essential way, in the respect that
B G,
that is
2 3 6?75
5.
Conclusions
The questions posed at the beginning of this paper, may be answered by

the following ndings:
1.
2.
The existence of redundant letters (such as Z, X, C) seems to result

from the necessity for 27 signs to exist in the alphabet in order to occupy the 27 places of the three enneads.
The absence of signs that denote the digraphs (OY, EI) or the variants of the `dikhrona vowels,' points to the fact that for the ancient
Greeks the choice of vowels was restricted by the existence of letters
used in Semitic scripts as matres lectionis or even as vowels. That
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
205
means that Y and W, as well as all the signs following T, were maybe
inherited from pre-existing signaries and were not created ex nihilo.76
The above point (2) is further supported by the rarity of C, which
suggests that this element was rather inherited and not invented by
the Greeks, so we may conclude the same for all elements before C
and after T, that is Y, F, X. It cannot be ruled out that W and
were invented by the Ionians, but most probable seems that
Ionians created their alphabet of 27 stoikheia by transforming the existing Semitic matres lectionis and quasi-vowels into stable vowels and
by giving to the rest of the Semitic consonants the closest phonetic values that existed in their speech.
Evidently, the above points are further supported by the glorious
march of the enneads of the Egyptian decimal numeral system, long
after the formation of the Greek alphabet and maybe from the history of alphabetic writing before the `Greek Age.'
The elements-letters , , were dropped later from writing words
either because they had from the beginning almost the same sound
as others (probably Y, K, S) and therefore they were totally useless,
or because they became useless due to phonological changes along
with the subsequent evolution of language.
The above points remove the reservations about the wisdom of the
Greek creators (or adaptors) of the alphabet. It was not a compromise between scribes or rhapsodists, but a compromise dictated by
the need of 27 stoikheia. These stoikheia may have been inherited
either as a complete set from a Semitic 27-element signary, which
already was in itself a numeral system, or have been selected from a
broader set of signs, like the 27 3 of Ugarit, in order to serve as an
arithmetic system.
We could of course suppose that the Ionians, during the eighth century
BC, invented the `phonemic principle,' that is the missing vowels, and simultaneously the ènneadic principle,' creating their alphabet and their
numeral system. But this would be really a twin Ionian wonder, a so great
achievement that seems improbable as if twin Athenae, and not just
one, were born from the head of Zeus. It cannot be excluded; we can accept that a double wonder happened and stop asking questions about the
inconsistencies of the Greek writing system. But it is more plausible to
think that Ionians perfected preexisting arithmetic and grammatical traditions, that they normalised the use of digits and letters, that they invented
new uses of existing signaries, creating new possibilities for the expression of the human mind through signs. Of course, the great defect of
this argument is that ìf this principle [of 27 letter-digits] had been in
206
D. K. Psychoyos
operation from the beginning, one would expect ve empty letter-numerals

in Hebrew-Aramaic script, preserving the earlier total of 27,' as Peter T.
Daniels puts it (2003: 72), commending upon Gamkrelidze's (1994) nding about the insistence of enneads in the Greek-based Eastern Christian
alphabets. If such frozen letters existed, the double function of the Semitic
consonantary would be of course obvious. But even the Greek alphabet,
according to all grammars of the world for the last 2,000 years, does not
have frozen èmpty letters': it has 24 letters. If one knows about ancient
numeral systems, she may nd that there are and 3 episemata, signs of
èctopic gestation,' which have nothing to do with the actual alphabet.
So, the real question is: have 27 (or 18) of the Semitic letters ever been
used as digits, before the invention of Greek alphabet? To answer this
question one has to nd the letters and their order in `the original' linear
Semitic alphabet, the ancestor of the Ugaritic alphabet, (or of a linear ospring of it) and then try to nd if dierent incomprehensible inscriptions
on ostraca are in reality arithmetic operations. And why not to look if incomprehensible cuneiform alphabetic inscriptions are in reality calculations? We have to remember that the existence of an abacus-type numeral
system (Greek acrophonic, Hieroglyphic, etc.) does not exclude the existence of a Milesian-type scientic system.
The crucial point is the necessity of 27 signs to exist from the beginning,
in order for the Greek alphabet to function as a numeral system too and
in order for the inconsistencies to be lifted. At this point, we have to keep
in mind that the mythical inventors of writing were not poets, rhapsodists or priests. They were scientists, mathematicians, and technicians: the
Egyptian god Thoth `rst invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry
and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and moreover letters' (Plato
Phaedrus: c. 274c. 275). That is to say letters, the invention of which
Plato believes made men `wise in their own conceit instead of wise,'
come last in the order of the exploits of Thoth. Prometheus, to whom certain Greeks attribute the invention of the alphabet, stole the secrets of re
and of metallurgy from Hephaestus and gave them to mortal men, out of
pity for their nakedness and defenselessness. He even taught them astronomy, navigation, and farming. Palamedes, another mythical creator of
the Greek alphabet, cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos, hero of the
Trojan War, was versatile and creative, not cunning and devious. For
this reason, Odysseus hated him and plotted his murder, accusing him of
complicity with the Trojans. Apart from letters (with special reference
to the arrangement of the sequence of the letters) he is said to have invented numbers, the division of time according to the movement of stars,
coins, weights and measures, the Palamedian Abacus for calculations,
dice, and lighthouses; he also knew how to organise military campaigns
207
and to distribute the provisions to the soldiers with scrupulous fairness, so

that there would not be any delays or complaints. In Aulis, when the
Achaeans were waiting for favourable winds to set sail for Troy, he
organized righteously their provisioning and calmed down the army
most probably because of his love for Iphigeneia, one may suppose, as
he wished to save her from the angry hordes of soldiers who demanded
that Agamemnon should sacrice her. Palamedes is not wise Athena,
nor Prometheus the Titan: he is the human spirit of science, inventiveness
and technology.77
Of course the best known reference to the creator of the Greek alphabet is that of Herodotus (among many others) to the Phoenician Kadmos,
whom the annotator of Dionysios of Thrace calls a Milesian, while some
other place `Foinikh' in Karia, that is next to Ionia, and claim that references to the well-known Phoenicia is a later confusion (Sigalav 1934: 33).
5.1.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber mu man schreiben
There are numerous references to the origins of the writing and the alphabet, either mythological or historical, something to suit everybody. Perhaps the present day state of writing by means of computers makes us
better aware of the fact that writing uses and produces above all technology: writing, in the wider sense of the term, which includes mathematics
too, as with the writing systems referred to here, maybe even with others
which we ignore so far; writing, which comprises the semiotic activities
of physics, chemistry, cartography, and biology. All these sciences and
skills that writing has created are not dependent on human language and
speech they are semiotic constructions for all those entities, which the
human Reason creates but which cannot be represented by speech. It is on
these that technology is based, on signs that crystallise into matter, on
software that becomes hardware. Writing was invented for the expression
of what cannot be spoken, just as the Pythagoreans discovered to their
horror, when they came up against the problem of expressing with their
digits the arrhtoi ariymoi (ineable numbers), the ìrrational numbers,'
the ratio of two incommensurable magnitudes; for instance, the ratio
formed by the diagonal and the side of a square. According to one story,
they condemned the traitor Hippasus of Metapontium to death by drowning in the sea, because he had revealed to those outside the circle of the
initiated the great secret: that there are things we can write but cannot
speak. According to another version of this story, the Pythagoreans were
not the ones to punish him but gods themselves: poor Hippasus was
shipwrecked and drowned. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber mu
man schreiben. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must write.78
208
D. K. Psychoyos
The fact that alphabetic writing spread at the same time as the iron
metallurgy may not be a simple coincidence. Pithekoussai, just like Lefkandi in Euboea (with some very short grati), where the oldest Greek
inscriptions have been discovered, are centers for the working of iron
ore. The early Greeks have been out there in the West searching for
iron-ore, the raw material of new technology (Ridgway 1992). The Abecedary of Espanca is in the heart of the region where Tartessians produced silver, lead, tint maybe under the supervision of Phoenicians or
Greeks. The oldest examples of alphabetic (Proto-Sinaitic) writing were
found in turquoise mines in Sinai and it is strange how everybody
wonders if it was possible for humble workers, Semite prisoners of war
in fact, to have invented the alphabetic writing, but no one should discuss the possibility of it being the work of engineers, even though the
myths seem to point in this direction. It would be worthwhile studying
the relationship between the technology of metallurgy and the technology
of writing: since calculations are integral components of technology and
since isopsephy (that is, the hermaphrodite stoikheia, letters and digits at
the same time) was a semiotic reality for at least 2,000 years (from Sargon, 700 BC to Fibonacci, 1,200 AD), we must seek the ancient centers
of development of writing in places corresponding to those where technology and calculations are developing today: the NASA, nuclear reactors,
universities, the IBM and Microsoft of that age not to mention the
naval yards and arsenals. Technology, writing, calculations mean power
for cities, tyrants, kings, and emperors. Maybe alpha, beta, gamma, delta
. . . represent 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . in some language. In some Egyptian dialect
perhaps or in the secret language of Egypt's craftsmen, her engineers
who measured and constructed, who embodied ideas, calculations and
their reason into matter. À' cannot possibly originate from the picture
of the slow moving, sluggish ox, which represents unreasoned force, if
not stupidity À' has the shape of the àlphadion,' of the level, that
amazing, A-shaped tool which uses a plumb line to dene the horizontal
plane. Without the level, people would not have been able to erect palaces
and temples, to build dams, canals, dwellings, and pyramids. The level
has had this same shape of an A since the time of the ancient Pharaohs.
The letters B, G, D, E, refer directly to various masonry tools, as anyone can see by looking at the tools themselves, even though he may not
possess the imagination of the isopsephists (Clarke and Englebach 1934:
gure 263267).79
The isopsephists however smile when accused of being fanciful and are
not easily discouraged because they know one thing more: that the word
`scribe' in Phoenician is spr, and this word derives from the verb `to count,'
which only later acquired the meaning of `write' (Bonnet 1991: 150). They
209
think it may be redundant for us to talk about an Ìonic writing system' and
a `Milesian numeral system': for them, these two systems are one united
system, which is used either with the phonetic or the arithmetical values
of its signs, which naturally follow completely dierent rules.
In conclusion, grammar and linguistics are not the only (and maybe
not the best) guides for one to study the emergence and evolution of the
alphabet and other scripts. This should take place in the context of a
wider semiotics of writing, with the meaning of the wider process of production of the written signs, which `represent' not things (as painted images did) but meanings, that is to say what we understand too but do not
feel which, hence, represent human Reason in general and not specically human speech.
Appendix A
Table 4.
Letter frequency in Odyssey and Iliad 12
Letter
Odyssey
Iliad
Total
E
A
I
O
N
S
T
H
Y
P
M
P
L
D
K
W
Y
G
F
X
B
X
Z
C
Letters
Words
Verses
51,195
45,334
43,118
39,763
34,828
31,151
24,527
17,365
17,238
17,161
14,973
14,287
14,066
13,843
13,136
10,678
7,700
6,303
4,732
3,910
2,056
1,529
926
603
430,422
87,147
12,119
11.9%
10.5%
10.0%
9.2%
8.1%
7.2%
5.7%
4.0%
4.0%
4.0%
3.5%
3.3%
3.3%
3.2%
3.1%
2.5%
1.8%
1.5%
1.1%
0.9%
0.5%
0.4%
0.2%
0.1%
64,940
58,814
55,585
51,394
44,623
39,975
31,366
24,159
21,576
20,730
19,191
18,738
18,480
17,976
16,598
15,565
9,254
7,933
6,944
5,942
2,849
1,975
1,163
671
556,443
111,710
15,694
11.7%
10.6%
10.0%
9.2%
8.0%
7.2%
5.6%
4.3%
3.9%
3.7%
3.4%
3.4%
3.3%
3.2%
3.0%
2.8%
1.7%
1.4%
1.2%
1.1%
0.5%
0.4%
0.2%
0.1%
116,135
104,148
98,703
91,157
79,451
71,126
55,893
41,320
38,814
38,095
33,478
33,453
32,804
31,819
29,734
26,243
16,954
14,236
10,854
10,674
4,905
3,504
2,089
1,274
986,865
198,857
27,813
11.8%
10.6%
10.0%
9.2%
8.1%
7.2%
5.7%
4.2%
3.9%
3.9%
3.4%
3.4%
3.3%
3.2%
3.0%
2.7%
1.7%
1.4%
1.1%
1.1%
0.5%
0.4%
0.2%
0.1%
210
D. K. Psychoyos
Appendix B
Table 5. Letter frequency in Qur'an18
Letter
Value
alif
laam
nuun
miim
waaw
yaa=
haa=
raa=
baa=
taa=
kaaf
=ayn
faa=
qaaf
siin
daal
dhaal*
Haa=
jiim
Saad
xaa=*
shiin
Daad*
zaa=
thaa=*
Taa=
ghayn*
Zaa=*
Total
1
30
50
40
6
10
5
200
2
400
20
70
80
100
60
4
700
8
3
0
600
300
800
7
500
9
1000
900
45,072
39,698
27,774
27,490
25,763
22,341
15,086
13,693
11,846
10,674
10,580
9,659
8,969
7,186
6,993
6,161
4,964
4,549
3,412
2,832
2,523
2,184
1,695
1,682
1,487
1,320
1,246
860
317,739
14.2%
12.5%
8.7%
8.7%
8.1%
7.0%
4.7%
4.3%
3.7%
3.4%
3.3%
3.0%
2.8%
2.3%
2.2%
1.9%
1.6%
1.4%
1.1%
0.9%
0.8%
0.7%
0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
0.4%
0.4%
0.3%
Letters with * are the new letters added in the seventh and eighth centuries (see text for
details).
Notes
* I would like to thank my sister Ioanna Andreou for her advice and guidance concerning archaeological matters and epigraphies; Profs. Dimitris Maronitis, Demetra Kati
and A. Schaerlig for their reading of the computer script and providing me with ideas
and comments; my friends Giorgos Sayas and Dr. Giorgos Karametaxas for their help
in dicult moments of this work; Peter T. Daniels for his bibliographical assistance and
his penetrating remarks but especially for his strong opposition to some of the ideas
211
expressed here, which helped me to clarify them better, I hope; Jean Christianidis as
well as Chara Karapa and Charalambos Kritzas of the Epigraphic Museum of Athens,
for bibliographical assistance; Dr. Tim Buckwalter for calculating letters' frequency in
Qur'an; Helmut van Thiel for his gift of Homeric texts to anyone interested; and Dorothy Richardson for the English translation of the Greek original. In any case, for any
mistake and omission I am the only responsible.
1. Carpenter's example (1938: 67) about the necessity of vowels in the Greek script is a
classic one: if only the consonants were represented, then the `word' N could be read
as AN, ANA, ANIA, ANOIA, ANW, EN, ENA, ENI, ENIA, ENW, etc. On the other
hand, Gelb (1973: 91) maintains that the basic dierence between Semitic and IndoEuropean languages lies in the fact that they express, in dierent ways, morphological
and semantic dierences in speech: of these languages, the former (the Semitic ones)
with internal transformation of the vowels in the words, in the context of a `xed
framework of consonants'; the latter (the Indo-European ones) with the endings of the
words. Consequently, the reason for the `sacrice of the vowels' in Semitic writings
should be sought in `the relative stability of the consonants in contrast to the variability
of the vowels.' Skoyles (1990) attempts a more general comparison of the `readability'
between the alphabetic and consonantal writing systems, and systems such as the logographic Chinese and the syllabic Japanese.
2. During the past decade, this view has been enthusiastically supported by Powell (1991).
The last phrases of his book are as follows:
We cannot separate the invention of the alphabet from the recording of the early
hexametric poetry. We cannot separate the recording of the early hexametric poetry from Homer . . . Homer sang his song and the adapter took him down. From
this momentous event came classical Greek civilization and its achievements. But
no achievement surpassed that of Homer and his scribe, who made Homer's song
immortal. (Powell 1991: 237)
3. At this point a clear distinction must be made between the àlphabet' and the àbecedarium.' The alphabet is a theoretical construction, the hypothetical set of written signs
(`letters') that are used in texts for the representation of the sounds of a language, while
the abecedarium is considered to be the àctual realisation of an alphabet,' the real text
in which it is these signs only (the `letters') that are recorded in a xed order. We can
deduce the alphabet of a system of writing by classifying the `letters' included in various texts, creating in this way an àbecedarium by approximation' because we do not
know the order of signs, whereas an authentic abecedarium can only be found written
as it is. Theoretically, we know what the àrchaic Attic alphabet' was like, since we can
reconstruct it with letters included in inscriptions, grati, and dipinti of that period
which have been discovered in Attica up until now; we can also suppose that if at
some time there surfaces an authentic complete abecedarium of that period, it will have
exactly the same signs. Approaching the question in more general terms, we discover
that things are more complex: that is to say, there are also `diacriticals' that are used
in recording speech (e.g., the various àccents' or àspers' in Greek, French, Arabic,
German or Hebrew systems of writing), though they are not considered signs (`letters')
of the respective alphabets. Moreover, in various alphabets there seems to be no dierence between `majuscule' and `minuscule' letters, nor are the dierent forms which the
signs (`letters') acquire, according to whether they are positioned at the beginning, in
the middle or at the end of the word, taken into consideration. On the other hand,
there are signs which are included in abecedaria, but they do not appear in other texts
(for example the signs B and D of the early Etruscan abecedaria or the in the Attic
212
4.
5.
6.
7.
D. K. Psychoyos
ones). In reality, the àlphabet' is an arbitrary construction in which nobody knows
exactly what is included each time and in what order: should it the H, which is used
initially in Attica to show the `rough aspirate' be considered à letter of the archaic
Attic alphabet' or simply à diacritic,' since the later signs for aspirates, `dasseia' and
`psile' (`, '), were never considered as parts of Greek alphabet? Why is the xed cluster
(ligature) of letters `v st' (stigma), which the Byzantines established, not a `letter,'
whereas the sign `C PS,' which only the Ionians of all Greeks used, is one? Which
is the `correct' position of F? Before X, as in Ionic abecedaria or after it, as in Cumean
ones? Actually, the denition of what an àlphabet' is has been historically determined
on the basis of the number, form and order of letters found in àbecedaria' that were
created at some time and subsequently, as `frozen sequences,' took the xed form of
alphabets.
(Mpampiniothv 1998: 103 .; Allen 2000: 84). According to Petrounias (Petrouniav
2001: 418), the long vowels were not seven but eight: there was one more vowel [o:],
other than W [O:], which was also represented by OY. This opinion about the phonemic
structure of the Ancient Greek language broadens the polysemy of the letters and further supports the arguments that follow.
The reference is indicative. The problem of the correspondence between writing and
speech in Ancient Greek is exceptionally complex, since epigraphists and linguists
have to choose from among six possibilities every time they face two dierent written
versions of the same word, as the people who wrote them are not around to answer
questions or read for us those versions aloud. It could be a case of 1) contemporary
use of the same sign with another phonetic value, as for example with H in Attica and
Ionia; 2) a dierent pronunciation of the same word in some local dialect; 3) a change
in the form of some word, i.e., a change in speech over the years; 4) a change over the
years in the phonetic value of this alphabetic sign, just as H in Attica ended up by
representing a long vowel instead of a rough aspirate; 5) a lapsus calami of a hasty or
absent minded scribe; 6) a misspelling. Naturally, it is impossible for us to speak of
misspellings during the alleged `Golden Age of writing,' when there was complete correspondence between the sounds of the Greek language and the letters of Greek writing. From what is to follow, I think it will become somehow obvious that perhaps this
Golden Age never existed. It seems that the letters of the alphabet were used right from
the beginning just as they are today, to represent more than one sound; on the other
hand, the same sound could be rendered with more than one signs.
Objections about the existence of a pitch tone in ancient Greek are expressed in
Cuwogiov (2003: 2225).
À accented with the perispomene' (circumex) that is, its pitch accent initially rising, then falling is something that happens only to the long vowels, since uttering
them lasts longer. If the grammarians of Alexandria (the ones who delivered all this to
us via their Byzantine colleagues who implemented it in the Greek writing system) had
thought of an ànti-perispomeni' which is a quite reasonable possibility with the
pitch rising on the second half of the long duration and not on the rst then six signs
would have been required for the respective versions of A. Of course, the ancient
Greeks did not indicate accentuation at all (not even the spiritus asper, from a certain
point onwards) but they could well have done so: the Byzantines, immediately after the
great political and religious Iconoclast Crisis ended (middle of the ninth century), decided to indicate pitch and aspirates, and these signs remained in the Greek script for
1,200 years. The fact that the Byzantines made this decision while for many centuries
both pitch accentuation (if it ever existed) and the `spiritus asper' had disappeared, is
a signicant problem, which is nevertheless disregarded in all the theories which,
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
213
following the long tradition from Aristotle to Saussure, maintain that writing is a
`secondary system of signs,' the only reason for its existence being the representation
of the language (`l' unique raison d' etre est de representer la langue').
(Gelb 1973: 202; Naveh 1987, 62). Later on, as the Greek alphabet becomes more
widespread, the semitic letters het and ayin also served as matres lectionis, probably
because the ancient Greeks used them to denote vowels H and O, respectively, probably for their inherent phonetic values in Semitic languages, or because of some òbjective similarity' between corresponding Greek and Semitic sounds, according to Powell
(1991: 43, 45). Diacriticals are also used to denote the vowels in the case of Semitic
scripts. But, according to Sass (1991: 421), the Egyptians rst used three of their consonantal `monoliterals' as matres lectionis for the notation of [a], [i], [u], when they
used them to write àlphabetically' foreign names of persons or places and that happened in the thirteenth dynasty, about 1,000 years before the appearance of matres lectionis in linear Semitic writing.
The possibility that C (or X, Z) was heard as a single phoneme by some of the Greeks
and as a compound sound by others must of course be excluded, because later (after
the beginning of fourth century BC) all the Greeks adopt the Ionian script. I think
that the supposition that the Ionians, who use all of these letters since the beginning
of seventh century BC, are speaking as the other Greeks would speak 300 years later
cannot be supported seriously. In any case linguists consider that these three (Z, X, C)
letters correspond to compound sounds (see Allen 2000: 7882).
There are various interpretations to explain the existence of the double consonants, but
the most prevalent amongst the Hellenists is that it is due to the fact that X and C
can appear as nal consonants of words (Schwink 1991) which nevertheless, as we
know, usually were not separated when written by the ancient Greeks (scriptio continua), in contrast with the Phoenicians who used `word separators.'
According to certain scholars, the Homeric poems were written right from the start in
the Ionian alphabet and during the Classical Age only this alphabet was used for their
copies. Because of its cultural supremacy the Ionic alphabet became nally the alphabet of all Greeks (Bouturav 2001: 216). It must be noted that if only a fragment of the
Odyssey had survived, containing less than 1,000 letters, at all probability C would not
have been among them, so we would not be able to guess whether the Ionians used it in
their alphabet or not. Therefore, the corpus of texts which have survived from a certain
place and a certain period should be statistically signicant, in order to allow conclusions about the presence of rare letters. For instance, even if we nd PS instead of C or
O instead of W on a fragment containing a few scores of letters, particularly in the case
of rough grati on sherd, walls or rocks, as on the island of Thera, it does not necessarily follow that the C and W did not exist in the abecedary of that region; it possibly
means that the children who wrote them as part of a game resorted to `phonetic writing,' as almost all semi-literate people would do, using just what they knew, that is the
most familiar elements of the alphabet.
For the statistical processing of the Homeric epics, an electronic edition by Prof. Helmut van Thiel was used (http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/vanthiel/homerpur.
pdf ). If other editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey had been used, the results of the
counts would probably dier though not enough to radically alter this general picture, which is also conrmed by a letter count of Hesiod's Works and Days. And if an
ancient copy of those texts was available, one engraved in stone, we would possibly
have more elements to count beyond the usual 24: Hellenists have calculated that
some thousands of have been omitted from later transcriptions of the texts (Allen
2000: 7071; Mpampiniothv 1998: 106).
214
D. K. Psychoyos
13. One might claim that the prosody, the dactylic hexameter, shows in which position a
`dikhronon' vowel becomes long or short, because of its repetitive nature. But this
argument implies that there is no need for a distinction to be made between the long
or short variants of any vowel in poetry. The prosody determines it by itself. It also
undermines the need to denote vowels on a general basis, if their appearance follows
some well-known rule.
14. According to Horrocks (2001: 351) the Alexandrian grammarians of the second
century BC, in copying the Iliad and the Odyssey, applied (without much consistency)
the orthographic conventions of their time, in an eort to produce a `correct' epic
text based on older manuscripts, many of them written in archaic epichorial
alphabets. About the peripeties of Homeric texts at the hands of grammarians, see
also Reynolds and Wilson (1989: 28); Turner (1989: 15051); and Cuwogiov (2004:
150152).
15. (Allen 2000: 67; Mpampiniothv 1985: 37; Petrouniav 2001: 393). As far as I know,
no one linguist has supported a claim that X, C, Z were used to express unit phonemes in ancient Greek language. All agree that [ks], [ps], [sd] are compound
sounds.
16. These crucial problems will be discussed at the end. It should be noted that, in Modern
Greek as well, Z, X, and C occupy the last places in the tables of frequencies. It was
from the study of such tables and from the attempt to establish `the informative power'
the `quantity of information,' according to Shannon (1993) of letters and clusters
of letters in the modern Greek script, but also from the wish to answer the question
`why are X and C needed as they can be written as KS and PS?' that this research began and ended up in the present paper. Z does not denote a compound sound in Modern Greek.
17. Following the terminology proposed by Daniels (1996: 4) it would be more correct to
call the signaries made up of consonants (Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) by the
name of àbjad' or `consonantary.' However, for the needs of this paper, the term àlphabet' is also applied, for reasons that will be clear by the end.
18. For the frequency of appearance of the Arabic letters in the Qur'an, I am indebted to
the generosity of Tim Buckwalter (http://www.qamus.org), who kindly responded to
my request and did the calculation for me.
19. Throughout the text, I use the signs for sampi, for koppa, for digamma which
are the forms the elements had in later antiquity and Byzance. In the archaic and classical periode, sampi was written as a trident looking down and digamma usually had
the shape of an F (see gures 2 and 3). For all the other Greek letters the form they
have today is used. I also use M for the Semitic letter tsade, whose real shape was
something like a tall m (m is the minuscule for the Greek M).
20. Cf. Slings (1998) and Ruijgh (1997, 1998).
21. Most epigraphists claim that the alphabetic numeral system was devised after the invention of the alphabet and many of them believe that this took place much later, after
the sixth century. This question will be examined in detail further on.
22. Tod (1950), Guarducci (1967: vol. 1, 423424).
23. There existed another numeral system, the so-called àcrophonic,' which varied from
place to place. In Attica it was formed of digits I 1, P 5, D 10, H 100,
X 1,000, T 6,000, M 10,000 and of combinations of P and D to denote 50 and
of P and H to denote 500. It owes its name to the fact that its digits are the initials
of the words `pente,' `deka,' `hekaton' (where h is the rough aspirate), `talanton' and
`myrias.' That system was also additive, with a repetition of the digits to form the
values in between:
215
HHH 100 100 100 300;

MJJJHHDDDPII 10,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 100 100 10 10
10 5 1 1 13,237
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
There also existed other signs for the subdivisions of the drachma. The system was used
for simple commercial purposes, on abaci and monumental inscriptions, and not for
writing down arithmetical calculations (Fowler 1999: 223), and for this reason it is
not going to be treated here.
The exponent in both the case of and M was not written at the upper right corner, as
in our system, but just above S for the thousands and above M for the myriads. For
applications of to denote thousands, cf. West (1992).
Chrisomalis (2003) in a recent article in Antiquity supported also the case that Milesian
numerals are of Egyptian origin. But he supposes that this is unrelated to the invention
of the Greek alphabet (see note 51).
Ifrah (1998: 171173); Fowler (1999: 225).
Among the exhibits in the Musee d'Art et d' Histoire de Geneve, there is the memorial
stele of Ptolemaios Geometres (other than his famous Alexandrian colleague, Claudius
Ptolemy). The stone, which dates back to the third century BC and comes from Northern Greece, presents Geometres seated and pointing with his hand to a rectangular matrix with ten lines and ten columns. In the rst column and in the rst line are included
the elements A, B, G . . . Y (the pythmenes) and in the cells the results of their multiplication: it is a case of a complete Pythagorean Table. The table is towering over a small
boy, probably a student. It seems that Geometres is explaining to the student how the
threatening table, which is hanging above him, even though huge, should t inside his
little head, no matter what (Scharlig 2001: 99102, gure 4).
The word pythmenes (bottoms, oors) which the ancients use to denote the numbers AY, gives one the impression that we should write the enneads in the reverse order from
this of Table 2, from bottom to top; that is to say on the bottom (pythmen) A-Y, in the
middle I-and on top P-. But such a juxtaposition of the enneads is irrational for a
right oriented system of writing. It suits the left oriented system, which starts bottom
right and moves towards the top left completely symmetrical, in other words, with
the present day right-oriented system:
, W, C, . . . P
, P, O, . . . I
Y, H, Z, . . . , A
It is interesting that there are inscriptions written in this way, like the funeral stele of
Autokleides in the Athens Epigraphic Museum (EM 13474, IG 3 1273bis).
29. The `Rule of Archimedes' is a general one and concerns the product of two numbers
which are terms of a geometrical progression, with the rst term being 1 as in 1,
1 3, 1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , . . . Such a sequence is also apparently formed by the successive
terms of the decimal numeral system (1, 1 10 1 , 1 10 2 , 1 10 3 . . .). Archimedes
proved that the product of two terms of such a sequence belongs to the sequence
and is found in the position k m n 1, where m and n are the positions which
these two numbers occupy. In the case of the decimal system, the proof is simple:
if we have two numbers A 10 n , B 10 m , 10 n obviously occupies the (n 1) position in the sequence and 10 m the position m 1, given that the unit is in position 1.
216
D. K. Psychoyos
Consequently, the product A B 10 n 10 m 10 mn occupies the position
m n 1 (m 1) (n 1) 1, as the rule dictates (cf. Scharlig [2001], Heath
1921, Peyroux (n.d.), van der Waerden 1988). For the bibliographical suggestion of
Scharlig, I am indebted to Ch. Karapa of the Athens Epigraphic Museum, and for
that of Peyroux to J. Christianidis of the University of Athens. In the general case of
two numbers of the decimal system C c 10 n , D d 10 m , we will have:
C D c 10 n d 10 m
c d 10 m 10 n
c d 10 mn
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
Or we multiply the pythmenes c and d and we `move' the result m n positions as in

the examples.
(Harrauer and Sijpesteijn 1985).
With the use of ùnit fractions' the ancients were able to calculate what we call today
`the decimal part of the quotient.' (see van der Waerden 2000; Fowler 1999; and Christianidis 2003). The system seems to be strange and dicult, but we have to keep in
mind that in the Greek additive system division has a great advantage over the positional system: for the division, say, of 0 AFIE by KE (1515 : 25), on the question of
`how many times 25 goes into 151?' which gives the rst digit of the quotient
the important thing is to nd a number smaller than 6 (which is the right answer),
whereas in our positional system we have to guess 6 exactly. Putting, say 5 or 4 instead
of 6, perhaps this division would demand a few more steps to be accomplished by the
Greeks but the result will not be erroneous.
And not o 0 2/3, as Chrisomalis (2003: 486) thinks.
According to an ancient Greek tradition (Aristotle: fr. 501), the alphabet had initially
18 letters (two enneads), but subsequently dierent mythical people like Palamedes, or
historical ones like Stesichorus, added new ones.
Chrisomalis (2003) also holds the view about that the use of myriad as distinct order of
magnitude is of Egyptian origin.
The `Hebrew T' has a numerical value of 400, because M (tsade) is inserted between P
and .
The need of an abecedary in order to understand the numbers, that is to say to know
that 0 AWNE is a quantity of (1,000 800 50 5) and not of, say, (1,000 700
40 5) has persisted for more than 1,500 years (see note 57).
Cf. Scharlig (2001). His argument, that the abacus was probably used both for (Greekstyle) multiplication and division, cannot be easily accepted. If a person calculating the
product of CNB NG, according to the example Scharlig gives (2001: 256260), can
perform calculations like C N M G 0 E (700 50 35,000) from memory, then she
has no reason to resort to an abacus immediately after that, in order to add up the
partial products and reach the nal result: she simply has to note down the partial results and perform once again from memory the much simpler additions. But, more
probably, she could calculate from memory the product of pythmenes (Z E LE,
7 5 35), put the result on the abacus and then slide separately the pebbles for 30
and 5 counting so many places as the sum of the distances of each of 700 and 50 from
the pythmen, that is 3. But in this case she has to use only abacuses with decimal columns and not abacuses alternating decimal-quinary columns.
It seems that Karl Menninger was the rst to relate the Greek multiplication via
pythmenes with slide rules, as I have found after writing this article. Speaking about
217
the way a Greek would calculate the multiplication KE MG, that is 25 43, he
writes:
Each intermediate multiplication, such as 20 40 was broken down into a computational problem 2 4 8 . . . and the gradational or rank problem of placing the
resulting 8 in the correct order of magnitude. This computation in two steps corresponds to the procedure on a modern slide rule, except of course that the nding
of the right order of magnitude was harder for the Greeks than for us, because the
numerals K and M have no zeros as do 20 and 40, from which the numerical rank
of the nal answer 800 can be easily read. (Menninger 1992: 273)
39. Naturally, for even greater safety and less eort, but with much greater a cost in terms
of time, one could consult the multiplications tables of 1 1 up to 9000 900, like the
one which exists in P. Mich XV 686 (Sijpesteijn 1982: plate 1; APIS record: Michigan,
apis. 2527).
40. Christianidis, Dialetis, and Gavroglou (2002).
41. (Heath 2001: 61; Peyroux n.d.: 9; Ifrah 1998: 222).
42. `Nine maidens, praise the glorious power of Artemis' (Heath 2001: 7679).
43. According to Ifrah (1998: 159) the rst mention of isopsephy is to be found in the
statement of Sargon II (who ruled between 722 and 705 BC) that the perimeter of his
palace at Khorsabad (16,280 cubits) was equal to his name but in which writing
system?
44. Òn thy birthday, Caesar, the Egyptian Muse of Leonidas oers these lines. The oering of Calliope is ever smokeless; but next year, if thou wilt, she will oer thee a larger
sacrice' (Paton 1980, vol. 1, 1: 470; see also Paton 1980 vol. 1, 2: 294).
45. Guarducci (1967: vol. 3, 5253).
`Leonteus, chief of the band, oers this gift to Ortheia 2,730
as winner of the Moa and the prizes having got 2,730
and my father crowned me with isopsephic verses 2,730.'
(Author's translation).
46. Ifrah (1998: 256).
47. Ìtem etiam istic scriptum fuit, qui sint apud Homerum versus isopsephi.' Aulus Gellius, (lib. xiv, cap. 6). Gronovius, in his notes on Gellius, p. 655. Cited in Adam
Clarke's Commentary of the Bible in the chapter about XX (http://www.godrules.
net/library/clarke/clarkerev13.htm).
48. The sign M is used for tsade, in order to dierentiate it from M, Mu.
49. Their views are discussed by Heath (2001: 5156), Jeery and Johnston (1990: 327) and
Guarducci (1967: 1, 422).
50. The epigraphic evidence presented here is not the result of systematic research to discover cases where numbers have been considered as words. Systematic was the search
for abecedaries and the cases of grati of Cumae and Corinthos (see section 3.2) have
been found because they are related to abecedaria: the rst grato coexists with an
abecedarium on the base of a Proto-Corinthian lekythos, the second because it is presented in the same article of Boegehold (1992) with an incomplete Corinthian abecedarium. Only the grati of the Athenian Agora (Lang 1976) have been the object of systematic search because only on such improvised supports of writing as sherd, lead
plates or ostraca one can hope to nd calculations.
51. For example, Powell (1991) and Ruijgh (1997) have in mind the form ending at W in
their arguments; Slings (1998: 645) refers to other examples as well. The existence of
this abecedary contradicts Chrisomalis (2003) hypothesis that the invention (or rather
218
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
D. K. Psychoyos
the imitation of the Egyptian demotic numeral system by the Greeks) happened at the
beginning of the sixth century, after the creation of Naukratis.
(Brixhe 1982: 221). There is also a controversial example of its appearance on the `Vase
of Nessus' in Athens, which dates from c. 600625 BC (Slings 1998). No others have
been discovered since then, except for the two referred to below, which are at the end
of two abecedaria.
Bokotopoulou (1991: 310). For the Àbecedarium of Poseideion,' I am indebted to
my sister, the archaeologist Mrs. Ioanna Andreou-Psychoyos who brought it to my
attention.
Pervanoglou (1867: 75).
Àn irregular lead plate was also found with dierent lines and the letters of the alphabet BGDEZHYIKLMNXOPPST . . . XCW probably written after the 94th Olympiad, where the last letter surprises, so we think it is rather a number (see Franz,
349).' (Author's translation)
The epigraphic evidence however does not support this view: according to Tod (1950:
138) the Athenians went on using the acrophonic system in public inscriptions until the
rst century BC, when most other Greeks had adopted the Milesian System. The question, however, does not concern monumental epigraphic art but calculating skill, the
application of the Milesian system in calculations. The Abecedarium of Athens
and the ostracon presented by Lang (see gure 6) is an indication that this was the
case: waxed tablets, ostraca, and lead plates were the most popular surface used for
rough notes and calculations.
Another interesting occurrence of a 27-sign Greek abecedary I discovered after completing this article in a rather unexpected source (Borst 1993: 37). It is an Irish manuscript of c. 850 AD presenting the Bede's calendar table, that is a table with the dates
of Easter for the years 5231063. The years are written in Greek numerals and on top
of the table there is the sequence of all 27 Milesian signs, obviously to help the users of
the table to understand the numbers.
Most probably Y is O, and consequently the eeces bought are 470 and not 409.
According to Tod (1950: 129) and Guarducci (1967: vol. 1, 423424), the use of the
`reversed order' (that is, with the smallest digit rst) for numbers below 1,000 was quite
common. If the rst sign of the grato is an O, it is clear that Boegehold's reading cannot be supported at all.
(Fowler 1995, 1999: 234240; Peyroux n.d.: 3134; Robins and Shute 1987).
Carpenter's view about the creation of the Greek alphabet at the end of the eighth century has not been adopted by other scholars. Jerey and Johnston (1990: 12) has recorded the various proposed `birth dates,' which start from the fourteenth century BC
and end in 720 BC. A bibliography about more recent views on this question can be
found in the works of Isserlin (1991) and Amadasi and Guzzo (1991). Cf. also the
more recent dialogue between Ruijgh (1998) and Slings (1998) in Mnemosyne.
(Naveh 1987, 1991; O'Connor 1996). The terms `Canaanite' or Òld Canaanite' can be
applied here, both denoting Semitic scripts that preceded the Phoenician.
The bibliography concerning these questions is immense. A more comprehensive approach to the matter is attempted in the collective work of Baurain, Bonnet,
and Krings (1991). Cf. also Bernal (1990), Millard (1976), Diringer (1968), Puech
(1986).
But see the objections of Maurice Sznycer as developed in Leveque (1991).
In reality, the proposition of Albright about an original Semitic consonantary of 27 letters is not independent of the fact that the Ugaritic alphabet contains 27 signs: he expressed this view after the ndings of Ugarit (Sass 1988: 4). Regarding the number of
219
letters, what really exists as epigraphic evidence is the ndings of Ugarit, the cuneiform
alphabets, the `long' with 27 3 signs and the `short' one.
65. (Swiggers 1991: 116; Naveh 1987: 31; O'Connor 1996: 92). For Segert, the 3 signs
(aleph a, alef i and aleph u)
. . . indicate the vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, in combination with the glottal stop (expressed in the other Semitic languages [sic] by the letter 'alep). In most instances
the three `'alep' signs express the sequence glottal stop vowel, but they are sometimes used for the sequence vowel glottal stop. If there is no vowel after the glottal stop, the i sign is used. The distinctive element of these three signs is the vowel,
while the glottal stop is common to all of them. (Segert 1984: 22)
Sivan calls them àleph signs . . . which indicates the vowels a, i, u' and which `seem superuous and the common assumption is that they were added at a later stage' (Sivan
1997: 9). In any case, the Ugarit signary cannot be considered a genuine consonantary:
it is either a defective alphabet, a beginning of àlphabetisation' of Semitic script, or a
mixed consonantal syllabic system. As for the existence of the `short' version at the
same period, this hints to the fact that the presupposition of a òne-to-one relationship'
in Ugaritic writing, that is the presupposition that òne letter expresses only one phoneme; one consonant phoneme is expressed by only one letter' (Segert 1984: 22, 28)
maybe is not valid. As for the phonetic value of the last letter of the Ugaritic signary,
it was ss for Naveh, su for Segert (1984: 30); Sivan (1997: 10) cannot accept a syllabic
value in a consonantary and proposes th, or s.
66. Jeery and Johnston (1990: 327), Young (1969), Swiggers (1991) and Brixhe (1982) indicate or guess that certain of the additional elements (Y, F, X, C, W, ) reached the
Ionians via Phrygia and Cilicia, but they do not agree among each other as to how
many or which those elements have been. Some Greeks however attributed to the
Phoenicians not only the fact that they borrowed from them their letters, but that they
also perfected the science of numbers: according to Proclus
para toiv Foinixin dia tav emporeiav kai ta sunallagmata thn arwhn elaben
h ton ariymon akribhv gnosiv [the exact knowledge of numbers originated
from the Phoenicians, because of trade and exchange]. (Proclus 1992: 65)
67. Schmandt-Besserat (1992).
68. Actually, there is something else that counts also for the isopsephist: in Spain there existed another alphabet, the so-called Greco-Iberian, an adaptation of the Ionic alphabet for the otherwise unknown Iberian language, supposedly due to the presence of
Phocaeans in the region. That is why in Spain there have been discovered much more
(sampi) than in any other place. Nevertheless, we do not have indications supporting
the numerical use of the Ionic elements there maybe because no one has searched for
them.
69. (Cajori 1993: 21; Ifrah 1998: 217). According to Goerwitz (1996: 488) the nal forms of
the three rst were already in use the year 125 BC, while the two others appeared later.
But, for a duodecimal arithmetic system (i.e., a system with 12 as its base) with similar
properties as the Milesian system, the necessary signs would be 22 (or 33, 44, . . .). We
know that there is an ùnderground' duodecimal system, which in combination with a
quinary (base 5) system, is incorporated in the sexagesimal (base 60 5 12) system
of Babylonians (Ifrah 1998: 9195). This duodecimal system was quite common for
many centuries all over the Mediterranean and in Europe for weights, measures and
220
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
D. K. Psychoyos
quantities of goods (line, inch, foot, yard; ounce, old pound; dozen, gross, great gross)
and for counting money (denarius, soldius) before the advent of the modern `metric'
system. There is no certied existence of a notation for such a system maybe the
Phoenician or Hebrew consonantaries were used for this purpose before the triumph
of the decimal system and the Milesian notation. The restriction of signs, from 27 to
22, and the coexistence of signaries with 27 and 22 elements could be related to that.
It could be that the Cabbalists would have had the enormous task to redo all their calculations on a new base!
Ritner (1996: 287). See also Gamkrelidze (1994: 2730); Gamkrelidze refers to the
adoption of 25 signs and not of 27, not counting the letter faj ( 90), which is in reality
, koppa, despite the fact that he thinks it `should be referred to the Greek part of the
alphabet'. The sign for 900 exists also: it is a variety of sampi, a sampi with a P over it,
as we can see in Ifrah (1998: 224).
In any case, the Milesian System is frequently used in scientic texts, throughout the
Mediterranean and in Europe by all those who, at that time, had an interest in mathematics. This means that the Greek-Milesian elements-digits are in use until the thirteenth century (Ifrah 1998: 241246).
The work of Gamkrelidze, which reveals the `paradigmatic' relations of the `Christian
alphabets' modeled on the Greek one, (such as the number, form, and position of the
letters) came to my knowledge by Peter T. Daniels.
This is just an allusion: the problem of the relationship between writing and language,
of the impact of the former on the latter, is too great to be presented here.
(Pandolni and Prosdocimi 1990). The simultaneous existence of M (tsade), between P
and , and of S, between P and T, dierentiates abecedaries discovered in Etruria from
those discovered in mainland Greece. So, when on inscriptions (e.g., in Corinth) the
sound /s/ is written as `M' probably we have a S turned 90 degrees to the right and
not a tsade so that we can conclude, along with Brixhe and Slings, that tsade had
never been an element of the Greek alphabet.
Because of the shape of C, the Byzantines in their cursive writing wrote it rather like v
(nal s). In the end it was named `stigma' and, with the prevalence of minuscule writing, the value of 6 was also denoted by st (ST).
It has been mentioned that there are the `classic' matres lectionis, the weak consonants
alef, he, waw, yod, which correspond to the Greek letters A, E, , I. If we add to them
the two versions of alef (alef i, alef u), which are at the end of the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet (as Y and W in the Greek), we have six matres lectionis and vowels if
we accept the parallel to the cuneiform existence of an linear abecedary with 27 (or
27 3) signs. And maybe ayin ( O) and het ( H) were also used as matres lectionis
(see note 7). If not, their transformation into vowels seems to answer the question: how
much more letters (than the existing Semitic matres or vowels) did the Greek language
need in order to express the vowel phonemes i.e., the question of distinctive pronunciation of dikhrona.
(Kakridhv 1987: 9193) Homer does not mention Palamedes and Powell (1991: 236)
nds in him the characteristics of the Adapter who could have invented the Greek alphabet, quoting an entry in the Dictionary of Suda, which refers to him as an epic poet
and a great rival of Homer.
`Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber mu man schweigen.' (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.) (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus:
7).
More about probable relations between Egyptian numbering and writing acrostics in
Hebrew in (Cuwogiov 2003: 111).
221
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303318. Yessalonikh: Upourgeio Makedoniav Yrakhv-Aristoteleio Panepisthmio.
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Dimitris Psychoyos (b. 1948) is Associate Professor and Director of the Media section at
Panteion University 3Psychoyos@tovima.gr4. His research interests include the semiotics
of writing and scientic systems, information theory, time, and communication. His recent
major publications include What are the Media? (2003); The Words and the Numbers
(2003); and The Printed Media (2004).

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The forgotten art of isopsephy

and the magic number KZ*

Semiotica 1541/4 (2005), 157224

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

The Attic system of vowels 4

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

The additional signs

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

2. The alphabetic system of numerals and isopsephy

BWKB 2,000 800 20 2 2,822 B WKB

Then would come the myriads (10,000), which were represented by

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Multiplying with elements as factors

As far as arithmetical operations are concerned, relating to addition and

additive systems of antiquity, the Babylonian or the Egyptian (van der

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

(8 3 24), and every digit of KD must be moved two steps, which is

The signicant dierence in the way we multiply numbers today is that

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

The question whether some sequence of elements constitutes a number

Expressions of the form,

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

and many mathematicians would have been able to do calculations like

Where ve steps starting with K is K, S, 0 B, B, K, S, therefore S

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

The abecedaria as calculating machines

Whoever attempts to carry out calculations in the way described above is

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

us about the logical connection between the elements-digits, that is to say

The forgotten art of isopsephy

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Samos, Poseideion, Athens

Larfeld's view could not be easily accepted by modern scholars because

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Figure 3. The Abecedarium of Poseideion (Bokotopoulou 1991)

perform arithmetical, or even geometrical calculations, if we bear in mind

The existence of this second abecedarium allows the isopsephists to

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Figure 5. Ostracon with two series of stoikheia (Lang 1976: A2b)

to end in (a missing) Y and the second to start with (a missing) I just as

According to Lang `this should probably be regarded as an alphabetic

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Cumae and Corinth

Sthsamenov, Orwhsamenov etc.): `Hissamenos, for you from now on,'

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

H ISA MENE TIN NYN A

Figure 8. The sherd from Corinth (Boegehold 1992)

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

In the vicinity of the magical KZ and L

Decades ago, there had been a controversy between the Hellenists as to

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

One thousand years, one thousand miles and maybe more

it was invented c. 1700 by Canaanites who had some knowledge of

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Figure 9. The Abecedarium of Espanca (De Hoz 1991)

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

dierent writing system, for a language entirely unrelated, is a rather

Sounds and the Procrustes' Bed of numbers

Isopsephy and the magic number KZ

Gamkrelidze 1994). Fifty years later, the year 406 AD in neighbouring

Gamkrelidze mentions three examples from the ancient alphabet of his