Archaeological excavations not only uncover traces of ancient peoples’ daily lives but also bring mathematical artefacts to light: sticks and more sophisticated counting devices, calculation tablets, papyri recording the solutions to certain problems, instruments for astronomical observation or land measurement, and tools for geometric drawing… Let's take a look at these mathematical instruments from the ancient world, used from prehistory until the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE.
Calculation
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After the hand, which allows us to "count on our fingers," the earliest natural counting aids were sticks—or any elongated objects—and pebbles. To serve as counting tools, these objects had to be specially fashioned to represent numbers. The oldest such artefact appears to be the Lebombo bone, found in 1970 in a cave on the border between South Africa and Swaziland and dated to around 43,000 BCE. Made from a baboon fibula, it bears twenty-nine clearly distinct notches, perhaps intended as a lunar calendar.
The Lebombo bone.
