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The number three is just an idea β three apples, three fingers, three days. But how you write it depends on where you live.
You write it as 3. An ancient Egyptian wrote it as πΊπΊπΊ (three sticks). A Roman wrote it as III. A Chinese person writes it as δΈ. A Mayan child wrote it as β’β’β’ (three dots).
Same idea. Five different drawings. Let's tour them.
The ancient Egyptians wrote numbers over five thousand years ago. Each big number had its own picture β called a hieroglyph.
To write any number, just draw the pictures and add them up. So 23 would be two ropes ππ + three sticks πΌ. 1,111 would be a lotus flower + a rope coil + a heel + a single stick.
Pretty! But to write a big number you need a lot of pictures. The number 999 needs 27 different drawings.
The Chinese system is also very old, and it's still in everyday use today. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are simply one, two, three horizontal lines β it doesn't get clearer than that.
And then ηΎ means 100, ε means 1,000, δΈ means 10,000. So 23 is δΊεδΈ β literally "two-ten-three" (2 Γ 10 + 3). Vietnamese borrows the same idea: hai mΖ°Ζ‘i ba.
Vietnamese numbers come from this family. When you say "mα»t, hai, ba", you're using a system that's thousands of years old.
In Central America, over a thousand years ago, the Maya invented something extraordinary. They used only three symbols:
So 1 = β’, 2 = β’β’, 5 = β, 6 = β’ on top of β, 10 = ββ (two bars), 19 = β’β’β’β’ on top of three bars.
The Maya were also one of the first people in the world to invent ZERO β a special shell-shaped symbol meaning "nothing here". That sounds easy, but most of the world didn't have a zero. The Romans never invented one. Nor the Egyptians. Without zero, you can't write 100, 1000, or 1,000,000.
You've already met the Romans. Their system uses seven letters that add up: I=1, V=5, X=10, L=50, C=100, D=500, M=1,000.
Romans were like Egyptians β no zero, and big numbers needed many letters. 1,888 = MDCCCLXXXVIII β that's thirteen letters for one number.
| Number | You | Egyptian | Chinese | Mayan | Roman |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| three | 3 | πΌ | δΈ | β’β’β’ | III |
| seven | 7 | π | δΈ | β’β’ β | VII |
| twenty | 20 | ππ | δΊε | ββββ | XX |
| one hundred | 100 | π’ | ηΎ | (stack) | C |
| zero | 0 | β | ιΆ | shell | β |
Notice the bottom row: three of the five systems didn't even have a way to write zero. That's a huge problem.
The numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 that you and almost everyone in the world use today were invented in India about 1,500 years ago, then spread through Arab traders to Europe.
They have two superpowers the others didn't:
β Place value. The same digit means a different amount depending on where it sits. In 222, the first 2 means 200, the second 2 means 20, the third 2 means 2. The Romans had no way to do this β they had to write CCXXII.
β‘ Zero. Without zero, how do you tell apart 12 and 102? You can't. With zero, you can write any number β even one billion (1,000,000,000) β using just ten symbols.
That's why this system spread to every country in the world. Even in China and Vietnam today, when you do maths or pay for groceries, you use 0β9. The old Chinese characters and the old Roman letters are still around β but only for fancy decoration.
The way you write numbers seems obvious β but only because it won. For thousands of years, every civilisation invented its own system. Pictures. Strokes. Dots and bars. Letters. They all worked. But only 0β9 with place value made it easy to write giant numbers, and to do maths.
So when you see 2026 on a calendar, or pay 50,000 Δα»ng for a snack, you're using an idea from India, written in symbols that travelled through Arabia and Europe, before arriving in Vietnam.