The Pre-mechanical Age Sumerians and the greatest among those

of the Sumerian city of Uruk which

advanced the writing of cuneiform circa
3200 BCE.
Introduction
Our ancestors have been using various techniques The name comes from the Latin word
over the past centuries in order to communicate, cuneus for ‘wedge’ owing to the wedge-
trade, and record important events from the shaped style of writing.
beginning of time. In this module, we will discover
the earliest technologies used by humans to create In cuneiform, a carefully cut writing
and transfer data throughout the history of the implement known as a stylus is pressed
world. into soft clay to produce wedge-like
impressions that represent word-signs
Objective (pictographs) and, later, phonograms or
 Familiarize the different technologies used `word-concepts’ (closer to a modern-day
during the pre-mechanical age. understanding of a `word’).
 Ascertain the difference of the number
systems used in this era.
1.1.2. Phoenician

1.1. Writing and Alphabets Phoenician was a Canaanite language

which was related to Hebrew. Only few
First humans communicated only through information was known about the
speaking and picture drawings. The Canaanite language, except what can be
Sumerians in Mesopotamia devised gathered from the El-Amarna letters written
cuneiform. Then Phoenicians created by Canaanite kings to Pharaohs
symbols and Greeks later adopted the Amenhopis III (1402 – 1364 BCE) and
Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; Akhenaton (1364 – 1347 BCE).
the Romans gave the letters Latin names
to create the alphabet we use today. It appears that the Phoenician language,
culture, and writing were strongly
1.1.1. Cuneiform influenced by Egypt which was govern by
Phoenicia for a long time.
Cuneiform was a system of writing first
developed by the ancient Sumerians of
Mesopotamia circa 3500-3000 BCE
(Before the Common Era).

Phoenician Oblelisk from Cyprus

1.1.3. Hieroglyphics

Our knowledge of the Phoenician language

Neo-Assyrian Cuneiform Lexical List is based on the few written texts in
©The Trustees of the British Museum Phoenician. Before circa 1000 BCE,
Phoenician was written using cuneiform
symbols that were common across
It is considered the most significant among Mesopotamia.
the many cultural contributions of the
1|Page Module 2
 deeply saturated Delta mud. Stalks
The first signs of the Phoenician alphabet reached up to 16 feet tall (5 m) ending in
found at Byblos (City of Lebanon) clearly small brown flowers which often bore fruit.
derived from Egyptian were hieroglyphics, Papyrus
and not from cuneiform. ©Andy Polaine

The twenty-two (22) Phoenician letters are

simplifications of Egyptian hieroglyphic
symbols, which took on a standardized
form at the end of the 12th century BCE.
Like Hebrew and Arabic, Phoenician was
written from right to left, and vowels were
omitted which makes deciphering
Phoenician even harder.

The Phoenician writing system was by

virtue of being an alphabet, simple and
easy to learn, and also very adaptable to
other languages, quite unlike cuneiform or These plants once were simply part of the
hieroglyphics. natural vegetation of the region, but once
people found a utilitarian purpose for them,
In the 9th century BCE the Aramaeans had they were cultivated and managed in farms,
adopted the Phoenician alphabet, added harvested heavily, and their supply
symbols for the initial “aleph” and for long depleted. Papyrus still exists in Egypt today
vowels. This Aramaic alphabet eventually but in greatly reduced number.
turned into modern Arabic.
The papyrus of Egypt is most closely
By the 8th century BCE, texts written in the associated with writing – in fact, the English
Phoenician alphabet whose authors were word ‘paper’ comes from the word ‘papyrus’
probably not Phoenician appeared in Cilicia – but the Egyptians found many uses for
in southern Asia Minor and in northern the plant other than a writing surface for
Syria. documents and texts.

Eventually the Greeks, who were in close Papyrus was used as a food source, to
trading contact with the Levant, adopted make rope, for sandals, for boxes and
the Phoenician alphabet, added vowel baskets and mats, as window shades,
sounds, and thus created the Greek material for toys such as dolls, as amulets
alphabet upon which our modern Latin to ward off throat diseases, and even to
alphabet is based. make small fishing boats.

1.2. Input Technologies It also played a part in religious devotion as

it was often bound together to form the
Sumerians’ input technology was a stylus symbol of the ankh and offered to the gods
that could scratch marks in wet clay. The as a gift.
Egyptians write on the papyrus plant and
the Chinese made paper from rags, on Papyrus also served as a political symbol
which modern-day papermaking is based. through its use in the Sma-Tawy, the
insignia of the unity of Upper and Lower
Papyrus was a plant (scientific name: Egypt. This symbol is a bouquet of papyrus
cyperus papyrus) which once grew in (associated with the Delta of Lower Egypt)
abundance, primarily in the wilds of the bound with a lotus (the symbol of Upper
Egyptian Delta but also elsewhere in the Egypt).
Nile River Valley, but is now quite rare.
In Ancient Greece, books did not take the
Papyrus buds opened from a horizontal form known to us today, but rather were in
root growing in shallow fresh water and the the shape of rolls made out of papyrus.

2|Page Module 2
 The papyrus plant grows widely in Egypt, The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the topic of
and the material itself is made by cutting the many scholarly (and not so scholarly)
stem of the plant in half and laying it books. The architects of the time must have
crosshatch over itself, like a weave, before had knowledge of mathematics - and more
hammering it together. specifically of geometry - in order to
construct not only their pyramids, but also
the temples they constructed.

We have no mathematical papyri from the

time of the pyramids of Giza. There are
The Aristotelian Constitution of the however some temple reliefs predating that
Athenians is preserved almost intact on time period by several decades showing
four papyrus scrolls, copied around 100 rituals associated with planning the
CE (Papyrus 131) temples that accompanied the pyramids.

Papyrus sheets were formed in a range of The reliefs show the King marking off
sizes. Width was closely related to quality: predetermined lengths with rope to create
rolls containing wider sheets tended to be the correct dimensions for the temples.
more expensive than those containing Our present day knowledge of much of the
narrower sheets. Book rolls could then be mathematics of the Ancient Egyptians
extended by the addition of extra sheets if comes from the 12th dynasty. This family
necessary. ruled Egypt some 1000 years after the
pyramids at Giza were constructed. There
The nature of our evidence means that we are two major sources: the Moscow
have far more primary evidence about Papyrus - which dates to circa 1800 BCE -
books from Graeco-Roman Egypt, where and the Rhind or Ahmes papyrus - which
papyrus survives well thanks to the climate. dates to ca 1900 BCE, but is likely a copy
from an original dating to ca 1800 BCE.
Book rolls could take a number of shapes
and sizes, but studies have indicated that In addition to these two papyri there are
the normal size was about 20 sheets long. several other smaller fragments as well as
tomb inscriptions and notes written on
An average rolled-up book roll was pottery shards (so called ostraca) that give
probably around the same size as a wine us a glimpse into the mind of the Egyptian
bottle. The amount of text they could scientists
contain varied, but an individual book roll
could hold at least one book of Homer’s
Iliad, i.e. around 700 lines of poetry.

The text would be written on book rolls

horizontally, a column at a time – in the
case of verse, these columns
corresponded to the length of individual
lines, while in the case of prose, the length
could vary widely, but narrow columns
tended to predominate.

Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the

earliest “books”. The Egyptians kept scrolls
Ostraca
and the Greeks began to fold sheets of
papyrus vertically into leaves and bind
Experts have cautioned against drawing
them together. This was the earliest
too wide ranging conclusions about what
methods of data storage.
the Egyptians may or may not have known.
1.3. Numbering Systems
3|Page Module 2
 We only have a handful of ancient sources.
There is no way to know if we have a These scenes would have depicted the
reasonable cross-section of Egyptian wealth of the tomb owner and the depiction
knowledge of mathematics, or if we only on the tomb wall also meant the tomb
have a glimpse. owner would have these animals with him
in the afterlife.
1.3.1. The Egyptian Number System

The Ancient Egyptians used a base 10

number system. The number one was
depicted by a simple stroke, the number 2
was represented by two strokes, etc.

Numbers 1 to 9
King's Son Wepemnefret
The numbers 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and Phoebe A. Hearst
1,000,000 had their own hieroglyphs. Museum of Anthropology
Number 10 is a hobble for cattle, number Photograph by Bruce White
100 is represented by a coiled rope, the
number 1000 is represented by a lotus In this stela of the King's Son Wepemnefret
flower, the number 10,000 is represented we see the deceased sitting before a table
by a finger, the number 100,000 is full of offerings. The items on the table are
represented by a frog and a million was meant to depict bread. Notice the numbers
represented by a god with his hands raised that occur everywhere in the text.
in adoration.
This is a depiction of all the items
Wepemnefret wanted access to in the
afterlife. Next to his knee for instance you
see what looks like an inverted Y and loop
of some sort with the lotus flowers below
them. The left symbol represents linen and
The Higher Numbers the symbol next to it represents alabaster
vessels.
These numbers occur in for instance
scenes depicting cattle counts and in reliefs The numerals below them mean that he
with offering scenes. has offerings of 1000 pieces of linen and
1000 alabaster vessels. On the right below
the table we see offerings of 1000 pieces of
bread, 1000 jars of beer, 1000 antelopes
and 1000 oxen. The rest of the text refers
to even more offerings.

1.3.2. Measurement
Cattle Count, Ancient Egypt
The Ancient Egyptians took measurements
The scene above was copied by the
in several different ways. Some measuring
German Egyptologist Lepsius. The scene
sticks have actually been found in tombs.
depicts a cattle count. In the middle register
An interesting example is for instance the
we see 835 horned cattle on the left, right
measuring rod from the tomb of Maya -
behind them are some 220 cows and on the
Tutankhamen's treasurer - which was
right 2235 goats. In the bottom register we
found in Saqqara. The rod has the divisions
see 760 donkeys on the left and 974 goats
into smaller units on the side.
on the right.

4|Page Module 2
 But it would still be a few centuries before
zero reached Europe. At the beginning, the
great Arabian voyagers would bring the
Maya's Measuring Rod texts of Brahmagupta and his colleagues
back from India along with spices and other
Large distances were measured in cubits exotic items.
and the measuring device was a knotted
rope. Such a rope and its use is shown in Zero reached Baghdad by 773 AD and
the tomb of Menna in Thebes. would be developed in the Middle East by
Arabian mathematicians who would base
The Sumerians were the first to develop a their numbers on the Indian system.
counting system to keep an account of their
stock of goods and animals. The Sumerian The Italian mathematician, Fibonacci, built
system was positional; that is, the on Al-Khowarizmi’s work with algorithms in
placement of a particular symbol relative to his book Liber Abaci, or “Abacus book,” in
others denoted its value. 1202. Until that time, the abacus had been
the most prevalent tool to perform
It was the Babylonians who first conceived arithmetic operations.
of a mark to signify that a number was
absent from a column; just as 0 in 1025 Fibonacci’s developments quickly gained
signifies that there are no hundreds in that notice by Italian merchants and German
number. bankers, especially the use of zero.
Accountants knew their books were
Although zero’s Babylonian ancestor was a balanced when the positive and negative
good start, it would still be centuries before amounts of their assets and liabilities
the symbol as we know it appeared. equaled zero.

The renowned mathematicians among the But governments were still suspicious of
Ancient Greeks, who learned the Arabic numerals because of the ease in
fundamentals of their math from the which it was possible to change one
Egyptians, did not have a name for zero, symbol into another. Though outlawed,
nor did their system feature a placeholder merchants continued to use zero in
as did the Babylonian. encrypted messages, thus the derivation of
the word cipher, meaning code, from the
They may have pondered it, but there is no Arabic sifr.
conclusive evidence to say the symbol
even existed in their language. It was the Sifr is a Sanskrit word for empty and a
Indians who began to understand zero both corruption of Arabic word for nothing. In
as a symbol and as an idea. contemporary Arabic Sifr means both
“zero” and “nothing”.
Brahmagupta, an Indian Mathematician
and Astronomer, around 650 AD, was the 1.4. First Calculator
first to formalize arithmetic operations
using zero. He used dots underneath Merchants who traded goods needed a
numbers to indicate a zero. way to keep count of the goods they bought
and sold. Various portable counting
These dots were alternately referred to as devices were invented to keep tallies. The
‘sunya’, which means empty, or ‘kha’, abacus is one of many counting devices
which means place. Brahmagupta wrote invented to help count large numbers.
standard rules for reaching zero through When the Hindu-Arabic number system
addition and subtraction as well as the came into use, abaci were adapted to use
results of operations with zero. The only place-value counting.
error in his rules was division by zero,
which would have to wait for Isaac Newton Abaci evolved into electro-mechanical
and G.W. Leibniz to tackle. calculators, pocket slide-rules, electronic
calculators and now abstract
5|Page Module 2
 representations of calculators or During Greek and Roman times, counting
simulations on smartphones. boards, like the Roman hand-abacus, that
survive are constructed from stone and
It is important to distinguish the early metal.
abacuses (or abaci) known as counting
boards from the modern abaci. The 1.4.1.2. Middle Ages
counting board is a piece of wood, stone or
metal with carved grooves or painted lines The Apices, the Coin-board and the Line-
between which beads, pebbles or metal board are from the period c. 5 C.E. to c.
discs were moved. 1400 C.E.

The abacus is a device, usually of wood but

romans made them out of metal and they
are made of plastic in modern times, having
a frame that holds rods with freely-sliding
beads mounted on them.

Both the abacus and the counting board The exchequer derives is name from the
are mechanical aids used for counting; they chequered table which was used in
are not calculators in the sense we use the England from circa 1100 for calculating
word today. The person operating the expenditure and receipts.
abacus performs calculations in their head
and uses the abacus as a physical aid to
keep track of the sums and the carry’s.

1.4.1. Ancient Times

The Salamis Tablet, the Roman Calculi and

Hand-abacus are from the period c. 300
B.C.E. to c. 500 C.E.

“The Exchequer is an oblong board measuring

about 10 feet by 5...with a rim around it about
four finger breadths in height, to prevent
1.4.1.1. Salamis Tablet anything set on it from falling off. Over it is
spread a cloth, bought in Easter term, with a
The oldest surviving counting board is the special pattern, black, ruled with lines a foot, or
Salamis tablet. It was originally thought to a full span, apart. In the spaces between them
be a gaming board. Salamis was used by are placed the counters, in their ranks.

The accountant sits in the middle of his side of

the table, so that everybody can see him, and so
that his hand can move freely at its work. In the
lowest space on the right, he places the heap of
the pence; in the second the shillings; in the
third the pounds…As he reckons, he must put
out the counters and state the numbers
simultaneously, lest there should be a mistake
in the number. When the sum demanded of the
sheriff has been set out in heaps of counters, the
the Babylonians circa 300 B.C. discovered payments made into the Treasury or otherwise
in 1846 on the island of Salamis. are similarly set out in heaps underneath. The
lower line is simply subtracted from the upper.”
6|Page Module 2
 (excepting Chinese communities in North
—The Dialogue on the Exchequer, 1177 America and elsewhere).

In the middle ages, wood became the 1.4.1.3.3. Schoty

primary material for manufacturing
counting boards; the orientation of the
beads also switched from vertical to
horizontal.

In Western Europe, as arithmetic

(calculating using written numbers) gained
in popularity in the latter part of the Middle
Ages, the use of counting boards began to
diminish and eventually disappear by 1500.

1.4.1.3. Modern Times The Russian abacus is called a schoty

(pronounced "SHAW-tee"). It was invented
The Suan-pan, the Soroban and the Schoty in the 17th century and is still in use today.
are from the period c. 1200 A.D to the The design of the schoty is based on a pair
present. of human hands (each row has ten beads,
corresponding to ten fingers). The abacus
is operated by sliding the beads right-to-
left.

1.4.1.3.4. Mesoamerican Abacus

There have been recent suggestions of a

1.4.1.3.1. Suan-pan Mesoamerican (the Aztec civilization that
existed in present day Mexico) abacus
The abacus, called Suan-Pan in Chinese, called the, circa 900-1000 C.E., where the
as it appears today, was first chronicled Nepohualtzitzin counters were made from
circa 1200 C.E. in China. The device was kernels of maize threaded through strings
made of wood with metal re-inforcements. mounted on a wooden frame.

On each rod, the classic Chinese abacus

has 2 beads on the upper deck and 5 on
the lower deck; such an abacus is also
referred to as a 2/5 abacus. The 2/5 style
survived unchanged until circa 1850 at
which time the 1/5 (one bead on the top
deck and five beads on the bottom deck)
abacus appeared.
Since it was made from perishable
1.4.1.3.2. Soroban materials it is impossible to know whether
such a tool ever existed.
Circa 1600 C.E., use and evolution of the
Chinese 1/5 abacus was begun by the 1.4.1.3.5. Lee Kai-chen Abacus
Japanese via Korea. In Japanese, the
abacus is called Soroban. In 1958 Lee Kai-chen published a manual
for his "new" abacus designed with 4 decks
The 1/4 abacus, a style preferred and still (it combines two abaci; the top abacus is a
manufactured in Japan today, appeared small 1/4 soroban and the bottom one is a
circa 1930. The 1/5 models are rare today 2/5 suan-pan).
and 2/5 models are rare outside of China

7|Page Module 2
  Merchants who traded goods needed a
way to keep count of the goods they bought
and sold. Various portable counting
devices were invented to keep tallies. The
abacus is one of many counting devices
invented to help count large numbers.

Suggested readings/References:
1.4.1.3. The Abacus Today Essential of Computers 4th Ed.
By Jemma Development Group
There are stores in China where merchants Jemma , Inc.
still use an abacus to tally a customer's bill. Copyright © 2014

https://www.worldhistory.org/cuneiform/

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/17/the-
phoenician-alphabet--language/

https://www.bl.uk/greek-
manuscripts/articles/ancient-books

©Ed Byrne in 2013 https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/history-zero

A store in Hong Kong
https://mathstat.slu.edu/escher/index.php/History
The abacus is still in use today by _and_Numbers
shopkeepers in Asia and "Chinatowns" in
North America. The abacus is still taught in https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/
Asian schools, and a few schools in the
West. Blind children are taught to use the
abacus where their sighted counterparts Feedback
would be taught to use paper and pencil to
perform calculations. Answer the following questions below. Write your
answer on the next page.
In the 21st century, portable counting
devices rarely exist as separate entities.  Were you satisfied with the module
Instead they are simulated as Apps running content?
on desktop computers, smartphones and  Was the module easy to understand?
tablets. Civilization, which began recording  Is there anything you want to know more
history with a stylus and a clay tablet about the topic for this module?
thousands of years ago is re-using those
original terms today.

Module Summary

 First humans communicated only through

speaking and picture drawings.
 The Sumerians in Mesopotamia devised
cuneiform.
 Phoenicians created symbols and Greeks
later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and
added vowels;
 The Romans gave the letters Latin names
to create the alphabet we use today.

8|Page Module 2
CONCEPT CHECK
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Subject GEE 2a/2b - LIVING IN THE IT ERA

Module No. 2
College COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE EDUCATION
Instructor/Professor LOUISITO L. MADRONIO, MPA

9|Page Module 2