Coptic Epact Numbers is a
Unicode block
A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...
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
Christianity is the second largest religion in Egypt. The history of Egyptian Christianity dates to the Roman era as Alexandria was an early center of Christianity.
Demographics
The vast majority of Egyptian Christians are Copts who belong t ...
. It 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. 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 = 5,000, 900 with thousand mark indicates 900,000) Two of the thousands marks together (visually similar to a tanween al-kasra in Arabic) represents a million in a similar fashion, and mirrors other Coptic conventions of indicating higher orders by repetition of marks.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Coptic Epact Numbers block:
References
{{reflist
Unicode blocks