The History of the Abacus

The abacus was probably first used in Mesopotamia. The first abacus was made with lines on the ground and drawing in the “beads”. Next came the “lined abacus”. The Romans developed it and you would have to put little disks on it to represent numbers. Then, in different countries, they started to update them to being made out of clay tablets. There were slots in the clay that you would push back and forth. They found one in Greece and is now in the Epigraphical Museum in Athens. Soon the Romans updated them on to metal tablets to make them stronger. Then someone invented beads and string so they started to use that. That was much better because it would prevent them from dropping them and made them portable. All of them are different and there is no correct looking abacus. They are used for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They are usually made of hardwood now but they are all different sizes.  The Latin word for pebble, calculus, is the origin of the modern term calculate. The invention of Arabic numbers made it easy to do long calculations so it was much easier to use the numbers than the abacus. That was when a lot of countries stopped using them. The abacus is still used to day, but mainly in China and Japan. These have seven rows of two on top and seven rows of 5 on the bottom.