![]() ![]() Almost all the simple arts of arithmetic operations are found in the Sumer. There is no doubt that mental processes which had taken great periods of concentrated effort were suddenly displayed with the Neolithic township establishment of Sumer. Just as lists, poetry, epics, lexica and many other types of writing appear so do various number concepts and operations become manifest in the Sumer. Aside from the problems of Proto-Elamite and Proto-Danubian, the Sumerians of the alluvial plains of Southern Iraq were the world’s first literate people. “three > trans.” The greatest innovation and advance of the Neolithic and protoliterate period was Writing (q.v.) however, in every case it appears to have been preceded by number.ī. The evidence from linguistics also indicates that “three” in many languages is equivalent to “many.” And in fact it has been pointed out with a fair degree of evidence that in all three of the most ancient language families of the Near E, Agglutinative, Semitic and Indo-European, the terms for “three” are philologically, if not semantically, related to the terms for “beyond” and “many” e.g. The experience of this is related in the Biblical story of the creation of Eve in which Adam first recognized, in the initial place of all future man, the fact of duality. Although a very dangerous methodology must be avoided it is important that number and numeral are two concepts that have been found in every tribe and culture examined since the founding of anthropological science. However, in various finds of Neolithic materials around the world sets of holes, posts, stones and massive megalithic boulders have been found all in patterns of regular geometric proportions, often in one to one, 1:1 correspondence. And there is supporting evidence of this sense when an arrangement of multiple simple geometric forms are related to yield a complex design to indicate the aesthetics of geometry. The cave paintings and glyptic arts of the paleolithic and mesolithic cultures are evidence of man’s sense of form and relationship. The concept of number is therefore as old as man, the creature “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Number is one of the basic modalities of the world-order.Ī. The ultimate origin of the concept of number must on the basis of the Christian worldview be traced to the inherent nature of the creation law-ordinances of God. The birth and progress of mathematical theoreticization is not apparent in the pre-theoretical revelation of the Biblical sphere. The Biblical concept of “number,” the nuclear meaning of which is discrete quantity made manifest in series-principle of the numerical time order in the plus and minus directions. ![]()
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