smoonHooch

True, but there is evidence that after the Catecandre they adopted some kind of roman numerals style system that had characters for the number [1] - [16], at least for ceremonial purposes. Peep the chapter headings in AoL, SS, or BoM.

Someone with more knowledge of number systems than I have already deduced the number system in a way that appears pretty elegant in this thread: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/1157-glyphs-as-a-number-system/page-2?hl=%2Bjapanese+%2Bnumber#entry19658 TL;DR is that it's derived from the Japanese style of number representation. You're right that it's not stictly Big-Endian base 16, it more closely resembles roman numerals than anything we compute with.

@SafestPear Yeah, I'm aware of the base 16 number system thing. I was toying with a theory that as a result of that, there would be 256 lines of longitude across the entire globe, and trying to justify it by calculating the radius of the planet using the map scale and the number of lines of longitude. But I don't think we have enough details about the latitude system or the globe as a whole to make a strong argument for it.

I feel like the fact that they have assigned a prime meridian makes me think that they do have something resembling a modern cartographic system. But it makes sense that they would not have pinpointed the equator, since they haven't done much exploring outside of the continent. So let's assume that Elendel is in the northern hemisphere. New personal theory! The lines of latitude represent how far south you are from the Well of Ascension. Hear me out as I show my work. I compared the map of the Elendel Basin with that of the world map from Mistborn Era 1 (http://isaacstewart.com/images/mb/mb02_WORLD_MAP-webres.jpg) to judge distances. According to the Basin map, the distance from Bilming to the coast directly north is approximately one latitude unit (24 pixels in GIMP). Looking at the World map, we can compare that distance to the distance from Bilming to the Terris Mountains (historical location of the Well). We find that the distance from Bilming to the southernmost and northernmost points of the Terris Mountains is 11.5 latitude units (275 pixels) and 14.5 latitude units (347 pixels) respectively. Since Bilming is at latitude 13, I think it would make sense that they are indexing based on the distance from the Well of Ascension. This would also be logical since the Well of Ascension is Magnetic North, so it would be relatively easy to find it in absolute terms and index your maps based on it.

I have a question about the Elendel Basin map found here: http://isaacstewart.com/images/mb/ALLOY_MAP_1_WORLD-webres.png I was looking at the Longitude and Latitude labels, and comparing them to the Steel Alphabet found on the Coppermind Wiki. The lines of longidue make sense, they run as follows from left to right: [ 1, Lesarium, 1, 2, 3 ] with Lesarium marking the city of Elendel. This makes sense that they would mark their capital as their own prime meridian. Where I get confused is the lines of latitude. They read as follows from top to bottom: [Atium, Malatium, Gold, Electum, Chromium, Nicrosil]. If we swap Chromium and Bendalloy for Atium and Malatium (assuming this map was using the archaic system of numerals) that gives us a list reading down of [9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. I would have expected their globe to be mapped out similar to ours, with the equator at 0 and ascending numbers as you approach the poles. But this numbering makes me think that either that is not the case, or Elendel is in fact in the Southern Hemisphere. Did anyone else notice this? any other theories?