Greek Numbers

There were no single Greek national standards in the first millennium BC since the various island states basically prided themselves on their independence. This meant that they each had their own currency, weights and measures and stuff. These led to small differences in the number system between different states since a major function of a number system in ancient times was to handle business transactions. However the article didn't go into too much detail to examine the small differences between the system in separate states so they just looked at its general structure instead. They said immediately that the ancient Greeks had different systems for cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers so people must look carefully at what they mean by Greek number systems.

The first Greek number system examined was their acrophonic system which was use in the first millennium BC. Acrophonic actually means that the symbols for the numerals come from the first letter of the number name, so the symbol has come from an abreviation of the word. For 5, 10,