1907-8.] A Note on the Roman Numerals. 175 
‘ the horses have pointed,’ i.e. ‘ there were seven of them.’ ... At the 
completion of each ten the two hands with open fingers are clapped 
together .” 
Turning now to ideographs, we find that a hand-symbol occurs in 
Egyptian, Hittite, Greek, Mexican, and other records. The Akkadian 
cuneiform for the word hand, |, which later was represented as JE|, and the 
Greek hieroglyph for Spaxi^v (“ what the hand can grasp ”), |~ I — 
(Gardthausen, Griechische Palaeographie, p. 259), may be adduced as 
A North American Indian making the sign for six. 
From the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology . . . Smithsonian Institution , 
1879-80 (Washington, 1881), p. 487. 
illustrating the transition to an angular or “ V ” shape. Similarly, we can 
point to an ideograph of the arms-gesture. An illustration of it is contained 
in Mr Evans’s “ Primitive Pictographs . . . from Crete ” ( J.H.S. , vol. xiv. 
p. 303), and a reproduction of that illustration will be found in Mr Edward 
Clodd’s Story of the Alphabet (London, 1900, p. 168). The form is 
and Mr Evans describes it as “another ideograph taken from 
gesture-language. The sign may have indicated * ten ’ or [being 
repeated ? ] any multiple of ten : thus any great number.” 
Let us now return to the Roman numerals and examine their further 
development. We have seen that the earlier signs in the series may be 
regarded as ideographs of gesture-language : that the signs of the numbers 
one to four were originally rude drawings of the fingers or digits ; that V, 
