Ancient Greek / Esoteric Greek

As if the contemporary Greek with its 24 letters isn't difficult enough, ancient Greek had even 3 more. These letters - digamma, koppa and sampi (green in the table below) are often said to have been lost, but more likely they were simply dropped at some point; not needed anymore.

In that old version of the Greek alphabet, each letter also had a numerical value, and the 27 letters were used for writing numbers. As you can see above, numbers 1 - 9, 10 - 90 and 100 - 900 were represented, and the number 321 would be written using the letters tau, kappa and alpha; or simply TKA.

Now, although it is generally known that the Greek alphabet has developed from the Phoenician one, when one compares the 27 Greek number-letters with the Hebrew alphabet, we can see that it's more or less only the visual design of the letters that are close to Phoenician. The basics, 27 signs that are both letters and numbers are very much a copy of the Hebrew matrix.

Now if you scroll up and down between the two tables, you can also see that much of the letter's succession is alike: 1 = alpha/aleph, 9 = theta/tayth and so on. Almost identical until number 50 and then we get some more divergence and incongruities.

The fact that letters could also be counted, because they are numbers as well, has led to a mystic science known as either Greek Gematria or Hebrew Gematria. Words having the same count - or value - were regarded as intrinsically connected. It was the earliest system of numerology and, because the Bible had been written partly in Hebrew and partly in Greek, innumerable scholars and mystics have counted each word, made lists of their relationships, interchanged one for the other. In doing so, many passages in the bestseller of all times have been elucidated and reinterpreted. Just one example, both the Hebrew words for Messiah and for Jesus add up to 888 ... get it?

It is a most interesting study but it can't be further explained on this page. If you're interested, type Gematria or Isopsephia (Greek) into your usual search engine.

Warning:
Gematria can be as addictive as computer games, mobile phones, sushi or sex. Don't come running and whining after xx years - you have been warned!