The Sumerian Abacus
The Sumerians lived as a civilization in the “land between the rivers”, or Mesopotamia, greater than 5,000 years ago.
Along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Sumerians gave way to the beginning of civilization by engineering cities along them.
While residing in the southern Mesopotamia region of Sumer, the Sumerians contributed to human innovation with inventions such as the plow, the wheel, cuneiform writing system, irrigation through canals and levees, the 60 minute/second time measurements we know today through their sexagesimal system, and the abacus computing device.
The word “Abacus” is derived from the Greek word “Abax” meaning “drawing board” which came from an earlier Hebrew word “Abaq” meaning “dust.” It took the form of a flat surface that had parallel lines with counters, such as tiny stones, to track quantity on the tablet.
The abacus enabled humans to be able to compute measurements and numbers beyond their current mental capacity.
Abstracting the idea of quantity, and utilizing it for operations such as addition and subtraction, the abacus became the world’s first tabulation machine, or a machine that processes information through table manipulation.
Unlike earlier civilizations, the Sumerians were able to create a concrete place value system using Base 60, instead of Base 10 like in our decimal system, that assisted with computations carried out on the abacus.
Obtaining robust economies via their success in trading, they needed counting and measuring instruments to transact business and distribute various goods such as livestock.
Additionally, being credited the first humans to use symbols as a mental tool to represent classes of objects to communicate large numbers, such as the number 60, the stone tablet proved to be very useful for the complex computations of their time.
There are even reports of abacuses being used in some of the first schools ever, within their civilization, and to carry out computations for their complex lunar calendar.
The implementation of the abacus has proven to be very effective and traces of adapted designs in Ancient Rome and China(Suanpan) have been used to carry out operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and cube root, as well. Ancient Rome and China’s trade relationship (Silo-Roman Relations) may give reason to their similar, and widely known, bead design on the abacus.
Lastly, the influence of the abacus can still be seen today with those who not only use the physical device but even with those who use the name such as Abacus by Emburse LLC.
