Florian Cajori

“ The Romans never used the successive letters of their alphabet for numeral purposes in the manner practiced by the Syrians, Hebrews, and Greeks, although (as we shall see) an alphabet system was at one time proposed by a late Roman writer. Before the ascendancy of Rome the Etruscans, who inhabited the country nearly corresponding to modern Tuscany and who ruled in Rome until about 500 B.C., used numeral signs which resembled letters of their alphabet and also resembled the numeral signs used by the Romans. ”

“ In the beginning the hieratic was simply the hieroglyphic in the rounded forms resulting from the rapid manipulation of a reed-pen as contrasted with the angular and precise shapes arising from the use of the chisel. About the eighth century B.C. the demotic evolved as a more abbreviated form of cursive writing. It was used since that time down to the beginning of the Christian Era. The important mathematical documents of ancient Egypt were written on papyrus and made use of the hieratic numerals. ”

“ Taking the symbol for 1,000 twice, on the multiplicative principle, yielded 1,000,000. The Hindu-Arabic numerals, with the zero, began to spread among the Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries, and they slowly displaced the Arabic and Greek numerals. ”