PART 2. BRANCHES
3 Counting with words and symbols in the Fertile Crescent
4 Counter culture from Athens to the Atlantic
5 Number symbols from India
Interlude: Number symbols
6 Machines that count: Around East Asia
7 Counting words and more in the Pacific world
8 Panorama: Counting in the Americas
Conclusion
Notes on sources
Select bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
What is counting?
What does it mean, to count?
A woman collects shells, pierces them, threads them one by one onto a leather strip. Ties the strip, wears it.
People creep into a sacred space deep beneath the earth bearing torches, water and pigment. At specially chosen places, they mark the walls with hand signs: one finger, two fingers, three fingers …
A scribe squats on the ground in the greatest city in the world; marks a slab of clay with symbols that, for him and his people, mean two, three, five, goats, grain sacks.
A sophisticated, literate Athenian citizen spends his day exchanging counters, voting tokens and coins, in an elaborate dance that determines the outcome of trials, gains him food to eat, reaffirms his status in the city and the world.
A weary Dutch businesswoman pores over a table of symbols in a handwritten ledger, checking, copying and correcting until the text matches up with reality.
A young Korean girl obsessively checks and rechecks her phone to see how many likes her latest vlog post has accumulated.
A Tongan woman utters a traditional, special set of counting words as she assembles hundreds of strips of pandanus ready to make a woven mat.
A Mayan king, deep in trance, presides as a new monument is dedicated in his capital city, adorned with elaborate symbols representing number, time and the gods.
The story of counting is as wide, deep and tangled as the story of human culture. It is the story of human attempts to find some order in an unruly world; or, perhaps, to impose on a reluctant world the order that humans find within themselves. Very nearly every culture documented in history has counted in one way or another, usually in several. The huge array of different ways people count, and of reasons why they do so, reflect their different preferences and preoccupations, their ways of thinking and being.
Counting underpins a vast range of activities, from census taking and food management, to assessing your popularity or tracking appointments and anniversaries. It leaves traces in the archaeological record across tens of thousands of years, starting long before cities, agriculture or writing. It stands at the root of science and technology, and it has often been suggested that if humans make contact with species on other planets, one of the first things to talk about with them – perhaps even the subject with which to learn to talk in the first place – will be counting.
But what is it?
