Cunei Form Symbols

Steeped in mysticism the secret language of numbers

Aided by the all time favourite Sesame Street, preschoolers learn to count 1-2-3-4. These numbers appear simple. Yet, they are steeped in mysticism. David Fontana explored numbers in The New Secret Language of Symbols (An Illustrated key to unlocking their deep and hidden meanings). He explores numbers in the section Patterns, Shapes and Qualities. “From the time the Babylonians had begun to record their calculations in cuneiform, the thinkers of the ancient world believed the laws of creation and the cosmos were revealed in numbers,” an excerpt from Numbers stated. “The great Greek mathematician Pythagoras saw in the numbers 1,2,3, 4 and the arising of form, from point to line to surface to solid; while the dynamism of odd and even numbers reflected a dualistic universe of opposing forces. Yet these forces were mutually dependent: just as odd numbers could not exist without even numbers, good could not exist without evil, light without dark, birth without death, and so on.”

The sequence 1, 2, 3, the number 3 widely symbolises the process of creation, from unity to duality to multiplicity. The Mayas and Aztecs gave numbers as names to their gods, who ruled the cosmos (Greek for world) with mathematical exactness. Many cultures assigned profound meanings to individual numbers and their multiples. For example, seven is seen as the most auspicious of all numbers. Recently, former prime minister, Patrick Manning staged a seven-day Walk for Democracy. In the East, multiples of eight are auspicious, and “eight times eighty millions,” refers to an infinite or uncountable number.

Zero

Neither odd nor even, the absence of quality or quantity, zero symbolises infinity, completion, totality, nothingness, the source from which the finite world arises and to which it returns. Coming to the west from India, via the Arab world, zero was originally written as a dot, the fulcrum on which all calculation was balanced. in Zen Buddhism, the empty circle denotes the annihilation of the self, the attainment of nirvana and release from the round of birth, death and rebirth.

One

Represented by a single stroke in numerals diverse as Arabic, Latin and Chinese, is the first cause, the divinity, the creator, God the Father. It is the undifferentiated oneness of primordial chaos, containing within itself the potential of all existence. In Confucian thought it was the perfect entity, and for the Greeks, before the invention of zero, it was the starting point of all calculation, the beginning. Psychologically it is the individual, the self or ego.

Picture Writing. How long people write - Warm Photos

Picture writing, also known as pictography, is one of the earliest forms of writing. Pictography uses sets of pictures, or pictograms, as a form of script. The Sumerians, who lived in ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), created the earliest known pictograms in around 3200BC. They used a script known as cuneiform, which combined pictograms and phonograms (signs representing sounds). The pictograms in the cuneiform formed recognisable symbols: for instance, a picture of a cow’s head represented a cow; a triangle next to a mountain represented a foreign woman.

Cuneiform was written on to clay tablets with sharpened reeds. It is very hard to make a curved mark with a reed stylus, so the lettering is very linear. The marks made by embedding the hard reed into the squidgey clay created little wedges, and this is where cuneiform gets its name – cuneiform literally means wedge-shaped writing (from the Latin, cuneus meaning ‘wedge’, and forma meaning ‘form’). The clay tablets that have been excavated by archeologists record all sorts of fascinating details about Sumerian society – temples built by kings, stories and the business dealings of traders. One such tablet records the number of bakers, brewers and slaves in a community. Cuneiform was in use from around 3200 BC until the 2nd century AD. Although it was originally based on pictures, it developed into a more linear stylised script by around 2800 BC.

At around the same time that the Sumerians were developing cuneiform, the ancient Egyptians were formulating their own system of pictorial signs known as hieroglyphics. The word ‘hieroglyph’ literally means ‘the writing of the gods’, from the Greek hieros meaning ‘holy’, and gluphein meaning ‘to engrave’. The hieroglyphic system was extremely complex, and was used in all sorts of texts, from religious prayers and traditional stories to medical manuals and legal documents.

There were thousands of symbols in the hieroglyphic system – snakes and birds, pots and flowers, eyes, human heads, beetles and lizards to name a few. But these symbols did not necessarily directly relate to the objects they represented – a picture of a beetle might only represent a sound rather than an actual beetle. Therefore, hieroglyphics were able to represent nearly all the words in the spoken language, and could deal with abstract as well as concrete ideas.

The invention of cuneiform, writing in Sumer

A mathematical history of division in extreme and mean ratio

Writing systems, a linguistic approach

Ancient Mesopotamia/India

Mathematical cuneiform texts