Forty-seven is prime and reduces to eleven and then two. Its two best-known associations are cultural rather than scriptural. In Japan the tale of the forty-seven ronin, the masterless samurai who in 1703 avenged their lord and then were ordered to take their own lives, became the national story of loyalty, retold endlessly on stage as the Chushingura; the number of the avengers is fixed in the tradition. In Freemasonry the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, the Pythagorean theorem, that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides, is a central emblem, displayed on the past master's jewel as a symbol of the mason as a lover of the arts and sciences.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-seven the reading already given to twenty-nine, uncertainty, treachery and deception from others, the two sharing a digital root of two; the reading sits in an odd contrast with the forty-seven ronin's story of unwavering loyalty already described above, one tradition finding betrayal and unreliability in the number, the other built around a historical episode celebrated precisely for the absence of either. In chemistry, forty-seven is the atomic number of silver, whose symbol, Ag, comes from the Latin argentum; the same root gives Argentina its name, since Spanish explorers believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the region held vast silver deposits.