Zeroes and III's

Zeroes and I’s

In elementary school I gained a basic understanding of how Roman Numerals worked. Like many (I think) I struggled to convert the production date of a movie shown in the credits (always shown in Roman Numerals in my youth) to the Gregorian Calendar before it disappeared from the screen. I got better as I picked up that everything started with MCM (1900) and all I really had to negotiate were the L's, X's, V's and I's. I quickly realized in third grade math (Mrs. Brown, Memorial School, Medfield, Ma) that doing basic arithmetic with Roman Numerals was fairly difficult; there was not logical flow using the position of the numeral as there is in the Arabic system: the ones place, the tens place, and so on (unless this is base 8). For example if you change CLIV to XLIV there is not logical progression. In CLIV the C means 100 more than L which means 50. The I mysteriously subtracts 1 from V which is 5 = 154. Swap the IV to VI and a change that would be monumental in the "tens" place but only gives us two more = 156. In other words, if the numeral before another numeral is less than it, we subtract it from the numeral on the right, if it is greater we add it. Replacing the C with an X in the fourth column (using right to left math standards) 154 becomes 44. Now we understand why the abacus is such a great step forward.

What we call “Arabic” numbers are really Hindu-Arabic, and in early Eurasian civilization, the Indians led the way in math. They even came up with a symbol to indicate nothing, the zero (0) around the seventh century CE. This caused the Romans to dig their feet in with CLIV. Certainly the expression of a quantity of nothing is a contradiction. How can you have a nothing? The Catholic Church decided this was certainly a satanic invention and outlawed its use. About a millennia later the Europeans must have decided they had enough as the zero and the use of Hindu-Arabic numbers won the argument. Today the zero sits proudly between -1 and +1.

What I was not taught was that the Spanish conquistadors encountered a symbol for zero when they arrived in the Americas. The may not have really known this as the Church also decided everything written in the Americas was also a product of Satan and systematically destroyed everything they could. In 1993 an archeologist looking over a stela finally came up with sufficient verbiage to allow linguists to interpret some of the early writing. These civilizations used three calendars, the “Long Count” which counts the days from a fixed date in the past, a sacred “Tzolkin” of 260 days and the secular “Haab” of 365 days. Since these calendars don’t drop a year at the birth of Christ (year 0), they were suitable for astronomical study. The Long Count worked something like IP addresses where each group of numbers meant something different. The remarkable thing is that the stela are inscribed with Long Count dates where zero is used as a place holder as early as 125 CE. It was definitely in common use by the third century CE, at least four hundred years before its invention in the old world.