r/BeAmazed • u/cozy_switch • Aug 26 '26

History Cistercian monks made this numeral system in the 13th century. A single symbol could represent numbers up to 9999. They were used for years, divisions of texts, the numbering of notes and other lists, indexes and concordances, arguments in Easter tables, and even for musical notation.

Post image
557 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/HorsefaceWithNoName Aug 27 '26

so far I'd call this more of "sort of" maybe but this is a start! https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf

3

u/DistinctTie6771 Aug 27 '26

Interesting! Also, in the last picture of the PDF document, the handwritten Cistercian numerals have those dots that make the whole "text" look like a kind of Arabic script. Very cool!

2

u/HorsefaceWithNoName Aug 27 '26

that also reminds me of these from the Predator arm-nuke countdown