Neolithic counting tokens Counting with tally sticks and tokens The earliest way of writing down numbers was to carve notches in tally sticks, and this method spread from Africa all over Europe and [...]
History of math: Sumerian multiplication table (2700 BC) Cuneiform multiplication table Once people in West Asia figured out how to write down numbers, about 3500 BC, they quickly began to want to use cuneiform to [...]
The constellation Orion What did Mesopotamians invent? From the Stone Age through the Islamic empires, great scientific discoveries have streamed out of West Asia. West Asia is one of the places where farming got started, [...]
Cuneiform writing (now in LACMA, Los Angeles) Early Sumerian writing West Asia is probably the first place in the world where people figured out how to write. (Though Egyptian people began writing [...]
Stone Age West Asia: A building at Gobekli Tepe (ca. 9000 BC) Stone Age West Asia By around 10,000 BC, people in West Asia were beginning to settle down in one place [...]
Roman tax collector calculating someone's taxes on an abacus (Metz, ca. 225 AD) Did you figure it out? Poor Claudia died when she was 25 years old, seven months, and [...]
Claudia Pieris' tombstone (CIL VI.15543) She lived 117-138 AD. Now in Copenhagen, at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The Romans used several different systems for writing numbers. Sometimes they wrote numbers [...]
A math problem showing place value How can you add big numbers without an abacus? You still group the sheep (or whatever) just as you did when you were using the abacus, but [...]
A boy walking backwards Subtracting numbers is just the same as adding them, only walking the other way along the number line. To subtract 3 from 8, you start on the number [...]
Walk along a chalk line Multiplying numbers is like jumping along the number line, with all your jumps the same size. It's the same thing as addition, except that you repeat [...]
