Prehistoric Counting
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Prehistoric Counting
Counting in prehistory was first assisted by using body parts, primarily the fingers. This is reflected in the etymology of certain number names, such as in the names of ''ten'' and ''hundred'' in the Proto-Indo-European numerals, both containing the root *''dḱ'' also seen in the word for "finger" (Latin ''digitus'', cognate to English ''toe''). Early systems of counting using tally marks appear in the Upper Paleolithic. The first more complex systems develop in the Ancient Near East together with the development of early writing out of proto-writing systems. Background Numerals originally developed from the use of tally marks as a counting aid, with the oldest examples being about 35,000 to 25,000 years old. Development Counting aids like tally marks become more sophisticated in the Near Eastern Neolithic, developing into numerical digits in various types of proto-writing during the Chalcolithic. Old world *Egyptian numerals *Babylonian cuneiform numerals *Aegean numera ...
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Carved Reindeer Antler With Tally Marks (4697848661)
Carving is the act of using tools to shape something from a material by scraping away portions of that material. The technique can be applied to any material that is solid enough to hold a form even when pieces have been removed from it, and yet soft enough for portions to be scraped away with available tools. Carving, as a means for making stone or wooden sculpture, is distinct from methods using soft and malleable materials like clay, fruit, and melted glass, which may be shaped into the desired forms while soft and then harden into that form. Carving tends to require much more work than methods using malleable materials.Daniel Marcus Mendelowitz, ''Children Are Artists: An Introduction to Children's Art for Teachers and Parents'' (1953), p. 136. Kinds of carving include: * Bone carving * Chip carving * Fruit carving * Gourd carving or gourd art * Ice carving or ice sculpture * Ivory carving * Stone carving ** Petroglyph * Vegetable carving ** Thaeng yuak (Banana stalk car ...
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Chalcolithic
The Copper Age, also called the Chalcolithic (; from grc-gre, χαλκός ''khalkós'', "copper" and  ''líthos'', "stone") or (A)eneolithic (from Latin '' aeneus'' "of copper"), is an archaeological period characterized by regular human manipulation of copper, but prior to the discovery of bronze alloys. Modern researchers consider the period as a subset of the broader Neolithic, but earlier scholars defined it as a transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The archaeological site of Belovode, on Rudnik mountain in Serbia, has the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper smelting at high temperature, from (7000  BP). The transition from Copper Age to Bronze Age in Europe occurred between the late 5th and the late In the Ancient Near East the Copper Age covered about the same period, beginning in the late and lasting for about a millennium before it gave rise to the Early Bronze Age. Terminology The multiple names result from m ...
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Counting Rod Numerals
Counting Rod Numerals is a Unicode block containing traditional Chinese counting rod symbols, which mathematicians used for calculation in ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The orientation of the Unicode characters follows Song dynasty convention, with digits represented as horizontal lines, and tens represented as vertical lines, which differs from Han dynasty The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Emperor Gaozu of Han, Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by th ... practice which represented digits as vertical lines, and tens as horizontal lines. The block also contains five ideographic tally marks, based on the five strokes of the character 正, which are widely used in East Asia. There are also two characters for use in representing traditional European tally marks (only Tally Mark One and Tally Mark Five are encoded, with ...
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Cuneiform Numbers And Punctuation
In Unicode, the Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform script is covered in three blocks in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP): * U+12000–U+123FF Cuneiform * U+12400–U+1247F Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation * U+12480–U+1254F Early Dynastic Cuneiform The sample glyphs in the chart file published by the Unicode Consortium show the characters in their Classical Sumerian form ( Early Dynastic period, mid 3rd millennium BCE). The characters as written during the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, the era during which the vast majority of cuneiform texts were written, are considered font variants of the same characters. Organization The final proposal for Unicode encoding of the script was submitted by two cuneiform scholars working with an experienced Unicode proposal writer in June 2004. The base character inventory is derived from the list of Ur III signs compiled by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative of UCLA based on the inventories of Miguel Civil, Rykle Borger (200 ...
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Ancient Greek Numbers
Ancient Greek Numbers is a Unicode block containing acrophonic numerals The Attic numerals are a symbolic number notation used by the ancient Greeks. They were also known as Herodianic numerals because they were first described in a 2nd-century manuscript by Herodian; or as acrophonic numerals (from acrophony) ... used in ancient Greece, including ligatures and special symbols. Block History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Ancient Greek Numbers block: References {{reflist Unicode blocks ...
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Aegean Numbers
Aegean numbers was an additive sign-value numeral system used by the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. They are attested in Linear A and Linear B scripts. They may have survived in the Cypro-Minoan script, where a single sign with "100" value is attested so far on a large clay tablet from Enkomi. Unicode See also *Linear A *Linear B *Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those ... References External links Open source font for rendering aegean numerals correctly- Google Noto Fonts Aegean languages in the Bronze Age Numeral systems {{num-stub ...
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Code Point
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but sometimes represent symbols, control characters, or formatting. The set of all possible code points within a given encoding/character set make up that encoding's ''codespace''. For example, the character encoding scheme ASCII comprises 128 code points in the range 0 hex to 7Fhex, Extended ASCII comprises 256 code points in the range 0hex to FFhex, and Unicode comprises code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. The Unicode code space is divided into seventeen planes (the basic multilingual plane, and 16 supplementary planes), each with (= 216) code points. Thus the total size of the Unicode code space is 17 ×  = . Definition The notion of a code point is used for abstraction, to distinguish both: * the numbe ...
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Supplementary Multilingual Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal format (U+''hhhhhh''). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called "supplementary planes". The last code point in Unicode is the last code point in plane 16, U+10FFFF. As of Unicode version , five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named. The limit of 17 planes is due to UTF-16, which can encode 220 code points (16 planes) as pairs of words, plus the BMP as a single word. UTF-8 was designed with a much larger limit of 231 (2,147,483,648) code points (32,768 planes), and would still be able to encode 221 (2,097,152) code points (32 planes) even under the current limit of 4 bytes. The 17 planes can accommodate 1,114,1 ...
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Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, emoji (including in colors), and non-visual control and formatting codes. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, and most modern programming languages. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, each being code-for-code identical with the other. ''The Unicode Standard'', however, includes more than just the base code. Along ...
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Aegean Numerals
Aegean numbers was an additive sign-value numeral system used by the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. They are attested in Linear A and Linear B scripts. They may have survived in the Cypro-Minoan script, where a single sign with "100" value is attested so far on a large clay tablet from Enkomi. Unicode See also *Linear A *Linear B *Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those ... References External links Open source font for rendering aegean numerals correctly- Google Noto Fonts Aegean languages in the Bronze Age Numeral systems {{num-stub ...
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Babylonian Cuneiform Numerals
Assyro-Chaldean Babylonian cuneiform numerals were written in cuneiform, using a wedge-tipped reed stylus to make a mark on a soft clay tablet which would be exposed in the sun to harden to create a permanent record. The Babylonians, who were famous for their astronomical observations, as well as their calculations (aided by their invention of the abacus), used a sexagesimal (base-60) positional numeral system inherited from either the Sumerian or the Akkadian civilizations. Neither of the predecessors was a positional system (having a convention for which 'end' of the numeral represented the units). Origin This system first appeared around 2000 BC; its structure reflects the decimal lexical numerals of Semitic languages rather than Sumerian lexical numbers. However, the use of a special Sumerian sign for 60 (beside two Semitic signs for the same number) attests to a relation with the Sumerian system. Characters The Babylonian system is credited as being the first known positi ...
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Egyptian Numerals
The system of ancient Egyptian numerals was used in Ancient Egypt from around 3000 BCE until the early first millennium CE. It was a system of numeration based on multiples of ten, often rounded off to the higher power, written in hieroglyphs. The Egyptians had no concept of a place-valued system such as the decimal system. The hieratic form of numerals stressed an exact finite series notation, ciphered one-to-one onto the Egyptian alphabet. Digits and numbers The following hieroglyphs were used to denote powers of ten: Multiples of these values were expressed by repeating the symbol as many times as needed. For instance, a stone carving from Karnak shows the number 4,622 as: Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in both directions (and even vertically). In this example the symbols decrease in value from top to bottom and from left to right. On the original stone carving, it is right-to-left, and the signs are thus reversed. Zero and negative numbers By 1740 BCE, the Egy ...
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