5 Comments
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Marion Boddy-Evans Art Studio's avatar

Another great piece, thank you. That Europeans needed help learning the "new" numbers has me laughing because I struggled to memorize Roman numerals as a child

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Shannon Baker's avatar

Beautiful, beautiful extract!

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Roberta L Dougherty's avatar

thank you as always for your wonderfully detailed and "illuminating" essays!

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Subscriber's avatar

Good article. I’ve recently bumped into the use of the Abjad Numerical System in studying some historical works. And it suddenly dawned on me that the one is indeed an ا. The two a -90 degrees rotated ب. The four a د without its standing tower, and so on.

The Hindus did add a 0 (and had the first credit-debit accounting system, called fortunes and debts at the time) but both worked off of the original Arabic Abjad Numerical Foundation.

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Joumana Medlej's avatar

That’s completely wrong and suggests you didn’t actually read the article.

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