Brief History Of Abacus

"Abaci" and "abacuses" redirect here. For the Turkish surname, see Abacı. For the medieval book, see Liber Abaci.


Indian
The Abhidharmakośabhāṣya of Vasubandhu (316-396), a Sanskrit work on Buddhist philosophy, says that the second-century CE philosopher Vasumitra said that, "placing a wick (Sanskrit vartikā) on the number one (ekāṅka) means it is a one, while placing the wick on the number hundred means it is called a hundred, and on the number one thousand means it is called a thousand". It is unclear exactly what this arrangement may have been, but it could refer to tokens being cast into counting-pits, or placed on numbered squares. Perhaps it was a type of abacus.

Around the 5th century, Indian clerks were already finding new ways of recording the contents of the Abacus.Hindu texts used the term śūnya (zero) to indicate the empty column on the abacus.

A Chinese abacus

Calculating-Table by Gregor Reisch: Margarita Philosophica, 1503. The woodcut shows Arithmetica instructing an algorist and an abacist (inaccurately represented as Boethius and Pythagoras). There was keen competition between the two from the introduction of the Algebra into Europe in the 12th century until its triumph in the 16th.
The abacus (plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that 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. 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.


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 Greek ἄβαξ abax which means something without base, and improperly, any piece of rectangular board or plank.Alternatively, without reference to ancient texts on etymology, it has been suggested that it means "a square tablet strewn with dust",or "drawing-board covered with dust (for the use of mathematics)" (the exact shape of the Latin perhaps reflects the genitive form of the Greek word, ἄβακoς abakos). Whereas the table strewn with dust definition is popular, there are those that do not place credence in this at all and in fact state that it is not proven.[nb 1] Greek ἄβαξ itself is probably a borrowing of a Northwest Semitic, perhaps Phoenician, word akin to Hebrew ʾābāq (אבק), "dust" (or in post-Biblical sense meaning "sand used as a writing surface").

The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses and abaci in use. The user of an abacus is called an abacist.

History
Mesopotamian
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.
Some scholars point to a character from the Babylonian cuneiform which may have been derived from a representation of the abacus. It is the belief of Old Babylonianscholars such as Carruccio that Old Babylonians "may have used the abacus for the operations of addition and subtraction; however, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations".

Egyptian
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.

Persian
During the Achaemenid Empire, around 600 BC the Persians first began to use the abacus.Under the Parthian, Sassanian and Iranian empires, scholars concentrated on exchanging knowledge and inventions with the countries around them – India, China, and the Roman Empire, when it is thought to have been exported to other countries.