The mystic status of numbers which led to this intense concern with their properties and relationships seems to have existed also, even before Sumerian times, in the beliefs of the neighboring Indo-Europeans. Modern scholars interpret similarities between word roots as signs of deep and original connections, just as ancient sages had long done with similarities between the sounds of words, or between the ways to write them. Based on this principle, some of the moderns have shown that the religious view of numbers among speakers of Indo-European languages goes back to the prehistoric period when the words for their relationships formed.
Here is what David R. Fideler says about these early word roots:
“Cameron, in his important study of Pythagorean thought, observes that harmonia in Pythagorean thought inevitably possesses a religious dimension. He goes on to note that both harmonia — there is no “h” in the Greek spelling — and arithmos appear to be descended from the single root “ar”. ¤This seems to ‘indicate that somewhere in the unrecorded past, the Number religion, which dealt in concepts of harmony or attunement, made itself felt in Greek lands. And it is probable that the religious element belonged to the arithmos – harmonia combination in prehistoric times, for we find that ritus in Latin comes from the same Indo-European root’.”
Guthrie’s “The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library”
Such traces of early reverence for invisible but knowable Numbers suggest that if some ancient mathematicians were aware of the major constants, they might have ranked these mysterious “super-numbers” even higher than the natural numbers. They would have assigned them important religious and symbolic roles, and they would have explored their properties and permutations as a means to understand the relationships among the gods they represented or were. ¤Reference: http://www.crcsite.org/numbers.htm
The mystic status of numbers which led to this intense concern with their properties and relationships seems to have existed also, even before Sumerian times, in the beliefs of the neighboring Indo-Europeans. Modern scholars interpret similarities between word roots as signs of deep and original connections, just as ancient sages had long done with similarities between the sounds of words, or between the ways to write them. Based on this principle, some of the moderns have shown that the religious view of numbers among speakers of Indo-European languages goes back to the prehistoric period when the words for their relationships formed.
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