Numerical Notation: A Comparative History.

• Author: Katz, Joshua T.
• Position: Book review

Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. By STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. ix + 486. $95.

In not quite five hundred (D, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 500, etc.) dense but exceptionally clearly written pages, the young anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis has managed to produce what would be for most people a crowning achievement of a life in scholarship: a monograph that is both astonishing in its comprehensiveness and careful about detail; that is both a work of reference and something that can be picked up and read, whether in whole or in part; that is both theoretical and data-driven; and that is simultaneously polemical in its attitudes and illuminating in its analyses. I am not an anthropologist and cannot claim expertise in numeration the--"visual, relatively permanent, and primarily non-phonetic structured system[s] for representing numbers" (p. 3)--but it seems to me that all readers of this journal, regardless of specialty, and for that matter most of the world's anthropologists, archaeologists, epigraphers, historians, historians of mathematics, linguists, and psychologists are going to need to pay attention to this brilliant and original book.

It is clear just from the titles of the chapters that Numerical Notation has wide--indeed, quasi-universal--appeal. Chrisomalis opens with a lively introduction (pp. 1-33) in which he comes out swinging against ethnocentrism, the "false ... dichotomy in anthropology between universalism ... and relativism" (p. 5), and sloppy thinking generally. He then treats in turn the eight distinct "cultural phylogenies" into which most of the systems fall: "Hieroglyphic Systems" (pp. 34-67), "Levantine Systems" (pp. 68-92), "Italic Systems" (pp. 93-132), "Alphabetic Systems" (pp. 133-87), "South Asian Systems" (pp. 188-227), "Mesopotamian Systems" (pp. 228-58), "East Asian Systems" (pp. 259-83), and "Mesoamerican Systems" (pp. 284-308). (1) I After further considering "Miscellaneous Systems" (pp.309-59), he ends with two remarkable analytical chapters--"Cognitive and Structural Analysis" (pp. 360-400) and "Social and Historical Analysis" (pp. 401-29)--and a brief conclusion (pp. 430-34). (2)

There are, of course, a history and principles behind the three symbols in "486" and the order in which they are written; likewise behind the two symbols in "ix" and their...