Coptic Epact Numbers is a Unicode block containing Old Coptic number forms. These numbers were used in some regions instead of letters of the Coptic alphabet that were used for encoding numbers, as was common in much of the world at the time, like Roman numerals. It was used most extensively in the Bohairic dialect of the Coptic language that became the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians.
The Unicode block contains separate characters for each of the digits, 1-9 (0 was not indicated), each of the tens numbers from 10-90, and each of the hundreds numbers from 100-900. These numbers were composed from left-to-right by successively adding the values that each character or digit represented. There is a thousand mark diacritic that multiplies the digit by one thousand (so 5 with thousand mark represents 5,000, 900 with thousand mark indicates 900,000). Two of the thousands marks together (visually similar to a in Arabic) represents a million in a similar fashion, and mirrors other Coptic conventions of indicating higher orders by repetition of marks.
Block
History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Coptic Epact Numbers block:
Version Count L2 ID WG2 ID Document 7.0 U+102E0..102FB 28 N3786 N3843R N3886 N3958R N3990 doc) N4103
See also
Rumi Numeral Symbols
References