A brief history of counting stuff #Mathematics #Commerce
We know that sophisticated trade-based economies go back at least 5,000 years — and that they required maintaining accurate inventories, tallying the proceeds, and keeping track of debt.
There is ample archeological evidence of specialized tools used for these tasks, too. For addition and subtraction, the implements included notched sticks and bones, rope tied with knots, or rudimentary manually-operated “registers” such as the abacus.
For multiplication, it was common to rely on lookup tables. The earliest known Babylonian multiplication table is 4,000 years old. Both the abacus and the multiplication table, of course, survived largely unchanged well into the 20th century.
See more history and a beautiful collection of counting devices in the author’s collection here.
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