Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet but carries the numeral value 7, because the value 6 belonged to the obsolete letter digamma (later written as the stigma). Zeta derives from Phoenician zayin ('weapon'). It has no notable independent mystical tradition beyond its place in isopsephy. The Greek letters doubled as numerals in the Milesian (alphabetic) system, in which each letter carried a fixed value; the practice of summing a word's letters into a number, called isopsephy, is the Greek counterpart of Hebrew gematria and appears in inscriptions, the Greek Magical Papyri and early Christian texts. Zeta's Phoenician ancestry places it in a borrowing whose exact point of contact, somewhere among Al Mina, Cyprus, Crete and Euboea in the Aegean world, is still disputed, though the borrowing itself, conventionally dated to around the 8th century BCE, is agreed to be the ancestor of every European alphabet still in use, including the Latin one covered elsewhere in this atlas.
The Greeks' own contribution was to give vowels dedicated letters of their own, something the consonant-only Phoenician script never did. Its isopsephy value of 7 belongs to the Milesian alphabetic numeral system, which also needed three further, otherwise obsolete letters, digamma (also called stigma), koppa and sampi, to cover every value from 1 up to 900; none of the three survives among the 24 letters in ordinary use today.