Multiply Your Knowledge With This Ancient Math Quiz

The Shang oracle bones, a series of animal bones and tortoise shells, were discovered in 1899, covered in ancient Chinese characters, including numerals. Dating back to the 14th century BCE, the bones depict a counting system using symbols including lines, triangles, and scorpions. Many of the Shang oracle bone inscriptions seem to record battle losses, animal hunt successes, and rudimentary calendar systems.

The ancient Incan quipu system of record-keeping was based on the positions of knots in a series of strings. Some larger quipu have as many as 1,500 strings, which could be woven, knotted, and colored to represent a variety of meanings such as numbers and importance. The method was based on a decimal positional system. Quipu was also used to recount stories, myths, and poems from the Inca tradition.

The ancient Egyptian numeral system is in base-10 and begins by using lines to represent the number one. Then, for every power of 10, a new symbol is added, with an upside-down "U" standing for 10, a spiral for 100, a lotus for 1,000, a bent finger for 10,000, a frog or tadpole for 100,000, and a sitting person for 1,000,000.

The Maya mathematical system was represented by three symbols: a dot, a bar, and a shell. A dot represented the number one; putting four dots together represented the number four. Horizontal bars represented the number five, so the number 15, for example, would be shown with three stacked bars. A shell symbol was used to represent zero. The system was in base-20 and is believed to have been designed with counting fingers and toes in mind.

In Gwalior, India, a small temple holds the oldest known examples of the number zero. On a plaque dating from 875 CE, the number 270 is written, referring to the size of a piece of land, and the number 50 appears in reference to a gift of flowers. Some civilizations, such as the Mesopotamians, came close to articulating the concept, but most historians agree that India is the birthplace of zero.

The ancient Babylonian number system was written in the wedge-shaped language of cuneiform. Despite it being a base-60 system, also known as sexagesimal, it was surprisingly easy to decipher if given a key. However, the Babylonians didn't have a symbol for zero, which made it hard to distinguish between numbers such as 1, 10, and 100.

Like the ancient Greek system, the Hebrew numbering system uses the letters of its alphabet to represent numbers. That alphabet starts with the letters aleph, bet, and gimel, which can be written for one, two, and three. While this system has been almost entirely replaced by modern Arabic numbers, classical religious objects and things such as the Hebrew calendar are still written using Hebrew numbers.

The earliest Greek numbers were simple symbols like lines and triangles. Eventually, however, the Greeks converted to a system that used many of the 27 letters in their alphabet to represent numbers. In that system, the first nine numbers were analogous to the first nine letters, making A (alpha) the number one, B (beta) the number two, Γ (gamma) the number three, and so on.

Roman numerals evolved from the symbols used by Etruscans roughly 3,000 years ago. The numeral system used I for one, V for five, X for 10, L for 50, C for 100, D for 500, and M for 1,000. No other letters or symbols were used in the system. It remained the dominant way of writing numbers throughout Europe into the late Middle Ages, when Roman numerals were replaced by the Arabic numerals we know today.

The abacus was one of the world's first mechanical counting devices. Such tools were used in the ancient world by a variety of civilizations, though they are most closely associated with the ancient Chinese, who began using them in the first century CE. Known as a suanpan in China, an abacus can be used for simple counting as well as for more complex operations like cube root calculations.