User:Boomyboom

Ancient Chinese Numeral System Introduction In a village of Xiao Dun in 1899 some archeologist found some bones and tortoise shells which had Chinese inscriptions on it. There were thousands of them. They had lots of question and some had numbers on them. This is how they found the numeral system. This had not just this but also had information of how many people have died in battles, animals killed, prisoners took in battles and more.

Table of Numeral System To write a larger number such as 4359 would be like this: It is positioned in the same way as us by putting the largest number followed by second largest and so on until it reaches the least large number. But there is no number zero in the system so they would simply not do anything in that part. For example five thousand and eighty would just be: Another number is: This is 8873. Theories of why these are the symbols.

Theory one Number ten is a simple line so they might have drawn this of it meaning to be like a toe so there fore number ten might have been pronounced like toe but in ancient Chinese. The same thing with nine how it looks like a fishing hook and number six looks like a hut or house so six could have been called hut but in ancient Chinese. This is unlike English because two isn’t drawn like anything it is pronounced and ten doesn’t look like a hen so this theory might not be true. Theory two Another theory is that the symbols could have been religious symbols because the numbers were written by soothsayers and they were all priest and also because the numbers were usually written for religious ceremonies.

Theory three Maybe the numbers were to do with the body like number ten could be ten toes and one hundred could have been one hundred lips.

Ancient Chinese Numeral System (Fourth century) This numeral system consist of a counting board were you must put some rods in the correct place for there value to work. The counting board was like a checkers board because it has columns and rows. The units would be on the right then going left it would be followed by tens, hundreds, thousands tens of thousands and so on. Below is a table showing the numbers. As you can see there is two numbers on the table. This is because the bottom section is used for units the above for tens the bottom for hundreds and so on in the same pattern repeating. Some numbers using this pattern would be:

1234 45698 60390 As you can see there is no zero’s on the board. This is because like the numeral system before in the Shang Dynasty they just leave a blank spot leaving nothing for the zero.

Some counting rods.

But you may be wondering why don’t they have negative numbers. They do, to do this they used black rods for negative numbers and red numbers for positive numbers.

--Boomyboom 07:46, 23 August 2006 (UTC)