THE ORDINARY ALPHABETIC NUMERALS 35
must have
presence in
can hardly
that it was
;al alphabet
it originated
tself, about
together by
enable him
twenty-four
Iphabets and
mipleted the
eil urges, as
and H ever’
ski’s answer 2
ary language
y, we cannot
as practically
■ical alphabet,
chools, where
ossible in the
ument is open
sould put the
would hardly
:e also, instead
itself, namely
ibout 453 B. C.,
1-2 above),
umerals found
used until the
actice to write,
a-n of the ruler
>-ns made them
,ce was limited,
irable that the
nding on local
ome paramount
p. dt., i, p. 421.
political authority to secure the final triumph of the alphabetic
system. The alphabetic numerals are found at Alexandria
on coins of Ptolemy II, Philadelphus, assigned to 266 B.c.
A coin with the inscription ’AXegdvSpov KA (twenty-fourth
year after Alexander’s death) belongs, according to Keil, to
the end of the third century. 1 A very' old Graeco-Egyptian
papyrus (now at Leyden, No. 397), ascribed to 257 B.C.,
contains the number kO = 29. While in Boeotia the Attic
system was in use in the middle of the third century, along
with the corresponding local system, it had to give way about
200 b.c. to the alphabetic system, as is shown by an inventory
from the temple of Amphiaraus at Oropus 2 3 ; we have here
the first official use of the alphabetic system in Greece proper.
From this time Athens stood alone in retaining the archaic
system, and had sooner or later to come into line with other
states. The last certainly attested use of the Attic notation
in Athens was about 95 b. C.; the alphabetic numerals were
introduced there some time before 50 B.C., the first example
belonging to the time of Augustus, and by a.d. 50 they were
in official use.
The two systems are found side by side in a number of
papyrus-rolls found at Herculaneum (including the treatise
of Philodemus De pietate, so that the rolls cannot be older than
40 or 50 b. c.); these state on the title page, after the name of
the author, the number of books in alphabetic numerals, and
the number of lines in the Attic notation, e.g. EH I KOVROV i
HERI | 0YZEHZ | IE dpiQ . . XXXHH (where IE = 15 and
XXXHH = 3200), just as we commonly use Roman figures
to denote Books and Arabic figures for sections or lines?
1 Hermes, 29, 1894, p. 276 n.
2 Keil in Hermes, 25, 1890, pp, 614-15.
3 Reference should be made, in passing, to another, gwasi-numerical,
use of the letters of the ordinary alphabet, as current at the time, for
numbering particular things. As early as the fifth century we find in
a Locrian bronze-inscription the letters A to 0 (including f then and
there current) used to distinguish the nine paragraphs of the text. At
the same period the Athenians, instead of following the old plan of
writing out ordinal numbers in full, adopted the more convenient device
of denoting them by the letters of the alphabet. In the oldest known
example opos K indicated ‘boundary stone No. 10’ ; and in the fourth
century the tickets of the ten panels of jurymen were marked with the
letters A to K. In like manner the Books in certain works of Aristotle
(the Ethics, Metaphysics, Politics, and Topics) were at some time