A Cool Fact!

It's a fact, at least if Perennialist crank Rene Guenon is to be believed:
Both the Chinese and Greek languages designate an indefinite multitude on a cosmic scale by the number ten thousand. So, if you were an ancient Greek or Chinese person and you wanted to talk about an epic battle you were at the day before, you could say:
"Looking across the field, I saw ten thousand men with spears charging towards us."
The Greek word murioi, from which I conjecture the English word "myriad" is descended is used both to designate the number ten-thousand, and also to mean 'an innumerable multitude".

Here is my explanation for why cultures so different as the Chinese and Greek have the same way of speaking.

You may have noticed that, when learning how to count in a foreign language, once you are able to count to ten you've pretty much got counting mastered. From then on it's just a vocab problem of learning the word for twenty and thirty and so on. But, something magical goes on when you learn the names for those first ten numbers. It's like all of counting is contained in them. So, you can never really escape the number ten when you are counting: it's insurpassible.

So, ten has a feeling of completeness and insurpassibility. However, ten is also the gateway to all the rest of the numbers, so it must also have something plenitudinous in its nature. How could we hint at this plenitude and still retain the terminal feeling that ten has? We could take ten to the second power and say "there were a hundred men charging towards me", but this doesn't contain the word ten, so we have lost the feeling of insurpassibility. You kind of want to say, "Oh yeah, why weren't there a hundred and one men charging towards you?"

Moving on, we could take ten to the third power: "there were ten hundred men charging towards me", but this doesn't feel quite right because, in saying "ten hundred"instead of "one thousand", we're making the number seem smaller than it is. One thousand kicks ten hundred's butt!

Now, take ten to the fourth power, and it's magic time baby! None of us can really concieve of a thousand of anything. We could comfortably count one hundred of something without taking a break, but to count to one-thousand of something would be pretty mind numbing. You would begin to say to yourself: "this is too much counting, when will it end?" So, one thousand is a great number for symbolizing plenitude and indefinitude. And notice that in saying "ten-thousand" we haven't lost the feeling of insurpassibility that ten has.

If we took ten to the fifth power, 100,000, then we've left ten behind and are emphasizing the number 100. If we take ten to the sixth power we risk looking like we are exaggerating. It looks like ten thousand is our number!