Did the Ancient Greeks Use an Abacus?
Did the Ancient Greeks Use an Abacus?Abacus question from email: Since the ancient Greeks used letters for their numbers, could they have used a counting system like an abacus that relies on a base?Answer: Did the Greeks use the letters to do the calculations or only as names for numbers? Were the Greeks really baseless? What is meant by an abacus? The letter-based numbering system may have started fairly late. Certainly by the time the Greeks were applying the names of their letters as the names of their numbers, they were already performing what we would call arithmetic operations. Using fingers and toes for counting must have come automatically to early humans, so even if the Greeks didn’t think of arithmetic in terms of a base 5 or 10, they still would have practiced it, and the Greek word used for counting in Homer (pempathai) has the number 5 as its stem, suggesting that hands (and base 5) were indeed used in reckoning. From Marks in the Dirt to the Abacus Tallying (by making lin
