Abstract
The author’s research on numerical alphabets surviving in some Slavic Moldavian manuscripts from the 16th−17th centuries shows that they represent sources of mathematical knowledge on large numbers in Medieval Moldavia. The six copies of this historic monument allow us to refute R.A. Simonov’s opinion that south-Slavic numerical alphabets from the 16th−17th centuries reveal only the tradition of denoting large numbers by extending the way of expressing thousands to the fifth and sixth order through attribution of the thousands symbol to all the main 27 characters of “Cyrillic” numbering. A series of identified manuscripts indicate the existence of another tradition, which uses special signs for 10,000 and 100,000.
The identified manuscripts of numerical alphabets represent new resources for studying the apparition and evolution of the numerical alphabet, until recently mainly known only in the late tradition of books in old Russia, according to the grammatical miscellanea from the 16th–17th centuries, which usually include a numerical alphabet whose variants have been published by I.V. Iaghici.
The identified Slavic copies of Moldavian origin use the circle to denote the 10,000 value and a denotation system of numbers up to the range of hundreds of thousands. These facts and the surviving copies of the numerical alphabet in various redactions prove the existence of some practical knowledge of large numbers in the medieval Moldavian Principality, at least in Church and monastic circles.
Keywords
16th–17th centuries, Moldavia, numerical alphabets, R.A. Simonov, Slavic manuscripts
