The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.

The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus.

The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses and abaci in use.

It is the belief of Old Babylonian scholars such as Carruccio that Old Babylonians " may have used the abacus for the operations of addition and subtraction ; however, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations ".

During the Achaemenid Persian Empire, around 600 BC the Persians first began to use the abacus.

The earliest archaeological evidence for the use of the Greek abacus dates to the 5th century BC.

This Greek abacus saw use in Achaemenid Persia, the Etruscan civilization, Ancient Rome and, until the French Revolution, the Western Christian world.

First century sources, such as the Abhidharmakosa describe the knowledge and use of abacus in India.

Some sources mention the use of an abacus called a nepohualtzintzin in ancient Mayan culture.

As a simple, cheap and reliable device, the Russian abacus was in use in all shops and markets throughout the former Soviet Union, and the usage of it was taught in most schools until the 1990s.

The abacus had fallen out of use in western Europe in the 16th century with the rise of decimal notation and algorismic methods.

The type of abacus shown here is often used to represent numbers without the use of place value.

They use an abacus to perform the mathematical functions multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cubic root.

The earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BC.

He wrote a treatise on the use of the abacus called Regulae Abaci, which was likely written very early in his career because it shows no trace of Arab influence.

Although it has also been translated as " The Book of the Abacus ", writes that this is an error: the intent of the book is to describe methods of doing calculations without aid of an abacus, and as confirms, for centuries after its publication the algorismists ( followers of the style of calculation demonstrated in Liber Abaci ) remained in conflict with the abacists ( traditionalists who continued to use the abacus in conjunction with Roman numerals ).

The earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BC.

The second is the Cranmer abacus which has circular beads, longer rods, and a leather backcover so the beads do not slide around when in use.

Many veteran and prolific abacus users in China, Japan, South Korea, and others who use the abacus daily, naturally tend to not use the abacus anymore but perform calculations by visualizing the abacus.

Greek engineers were the first to use canal locks, by which they regulated the water flow in the Ancient Suez Canal as early as the 3rd century BC.

In Ancient Egyptian architecture as early as 2600 BC the architect Imhotep made use of stone columns whose surface was carved to reflect the organic form of bundled reeds ; in later Egyptian architecture faceted cylinders were also common.

The Egyptians, Persians and other civilizations mostly used columns for the practical purpose of holding up the roof inside a building, preferring outside walls to be decorated with reliefs or painting, but the Ancient Greeks, followed by the Romans, loved to use them on the outside as well, and the extensive use of columns on the interior and exterior of buildings is one of the most characteristic features of classical architecture, in buildings like the Parthenon.

Its use began to develop from this original sense when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek ; in Ancient Greece the term διασπορά ( diaspora ) meant " scattering " and was used to refer to citizens of a dominant city-state who emigrated to a conquered land with the purpose of colonization, to assimilate the territory into the empire.

At about this time Eusebius compiled a Collection of Ancient Martyrdoms, presumably for use as a general reference tool.

Ancient Greek fell into disuse in western Europe in the Middle Ages, but remained officially in use in the Byzantine world, and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to the areas of Italy.

Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, while the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely ( instead having a raft of new periphrastic constructions ) and uses participles more restrictedly.

While the term grimoire is originally European, and many Europeans throughout history, particularly ceremonial magicians and cunning folk, have made use of grimoires, the historian Owen Davies noted that similar such books can be found all across the world, ranging from Jamaica to Sumatra, and he also noted that the first such grimoires could be found not in Europe but in the Ancient Near East.

This Harifian culture may have adopted the use of pottery from the Isnan culture and Helwan culture of Egypt ( which lasted from 9000-4500 BC ), and subsequently fused with elements from the PPNB culture during the climatic crisis of 6000 BC to form what Juris Zarins calls the Syro-Arabian pastoral technocomplex, which saw the spread of the first Nomadic pastoralists in the Ancient Near East.

Ancient Greeks were among the first civilizations to use symbols consistently in order to identify a warrior, clan or a state.

The English word Iberia was adapted from the use of the Ancient Greek word Ιβηρία ( Ibēría ) by the Greek geographers under the Roman Empire to refer to what is known today in English as the Iberian Peninsula.

The taboo against incest in Ancient Rome is demonstrated by the fact that politicians would use charges of incest ( often false charges ) as insults and means of political disenfranchisement.

** Thai Muay Boran ( Ancient boxing ) – Predecessor of Muay Thai, allows the use of headbutts.

" Ancient " or " Old " colours may be characterized by a slightly faded look intended to resemble the vegetable dyes that were once used, although in some cases " Old " simply identifies a tartan that was in use before the current one.

The commentator Servius's use of the passage ( in R. Maltby, Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies, Leeds ) asserts, under the entry portus, that the epithet was derived:

Many textbooks about Ancient Rome and Greece use the macron even if it was not actually used at that time.

Ancient Greek notation appears to have fallen out of use around the time of the Decline of the Roman Empire.

The critical thinking of Aristotle and his emphasis on the relationship between structure and function marked the beginning of physiology in Ancient Greece, while Claudius Galenus ( c. 126-199 A. D .), known as Galen, was the first to use experiments to probe the function of the body.

A form of range voting was apparently used in some elections in Ancient Sparta by measuring how loudly the crowd shouted for different candidates ; rough modern-day equivalents include the use of clapometers in some television shows and the judging processes of some athletic competitions.

Ancient Greek was widely known to scholars, but the details of its use in the Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt were not familiar: large scale discoveries of Greek papyri were a long way in the future.

" The first such Neo-druidic group to make use of the megalithic monument was the Ancient Order of Druids, who performed a mass initiation ceremony there in August 1905, in which they admitted 259 new members into their organisation.

Ancient Indian medicine, Ayurveda has recommended its use in food for its medicinal value, much of which is now being researched in the modern day.