There are places were Roman Numerals still reign supreme. King Henry VIII. And book chapters. Appendices. Plays, separating Acts. Spots Events like the Olympic Games. And finally family generations and those Monarchs.
They give sense of gravity - they can be seen on public buildings, monuments and gravestones. They stayed around for a longish time in book-keeping as they cannot be mistaken or forged like numbers.
That limitation of Roman Numerals only going up to 4,000, doesn't let our Trillionaires boast of their wealth. That is a row of many M's.
That's the difference between then and now.
"It needs to be remembered as to what the Romans actually used their number system for. The primary usage was in trade and commerce, and for the average trader it was highly unlikely that they ever had over 3,999 of anything, whether it be items, money etc."
"In today's society we grow up and live in a world of large, total numbers. We have a certain amount of dollars in the bank, it's about 238,855 miles to the moon, in 2019 US GDP was $21.43 trillion, about 68 million people live in the United Kingdom etc."
"Huge, total numbers. But whilst the ancient Romans did not have much to think about in such numbers (unless they thought about the number of grains of sand on a beach or something), it is quite likely that they thought of numbers in terms of groups rather than as actual total numbers like we do."
Here is the well-known Grimsby family name - where is that Roman Numeral date?
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