Abacus1

The abacus, also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool used primarily in parts of Asia for performing arithmetic processes. Today, abaci are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal. The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia,Africa, and elsewhere. The user of an abacus is called an abacist.^[2]

Etymology

The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from Άβακός abakos, the Greek genitive form of Άβαξ abax ("calculating-table"), from Hebrew ābāq (אבק), "dust".^[3]The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses^[4] and abaci^[5] in use.

Mesopotamian abacus

The period 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.^[6]

Some scholars point to a character from the Babylonian cuneiform which may have been derived from a representation of the abacus.^[7] It is the belief of Carruccio (and other Old Babylonian scholars) that Old Babylonians "may have used the abacus for the operations of additionand subtraction; however, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations".^[8]

Egyptian abacus

The use of the abacus in Ancient Egypt is mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus, who writes that the Egyptians manipulated the pebbles from right to left, opposite in direction to the Greek left-to-right method. Archaeologists have found ancient disks of various sizes that are thought to have been used as counters. However, wall depictions of this instrument have not been discovered,^[9] casting some doubt over the extent to which this instrument was used.^{[original research?]}

Persian abacus

During the Achaemenid Persian Empire, around 600 BC the Persians first began to use the abacus.^[10] Under Parthian and Sassanian Iranianempires, scholars concentrated on exchanging knowledge and inventions by the countries around them – India, China, and the Roman Empire, when it is thought to be expanded over the other countries.