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Ancient abacus5/26/2023 ![]() The latter has the merit of accounting more completely for the various usages of the word but neither derivation can be regarded as anything more than a more or less probable conjecture.Īdopting, for the sake of classification, the primary meaning of “anything raised,” we have: According to the former, the oldest meaning is that of the sanded board for calculations, rendered necessary at an early period by the rise of commerce between the East and the West. v.) or (2) abak, “to raise or lift up,” recently suggested in Wölfflin‘s Thesauri Latini specimen, 1884. Pretty soon they’re calling it just plain abak and then abax, and before you can say “Avi Atias,” it’s the abacus we know.AB´ACUS (ἄβαξ), a word probably of Eastern origin, which has been explained from two different Semitic roots: (1) abaq, “sand, dust,” a derivation propounded by several eminent French scholars and accepted by Daremberg and Saglio (Dict. “It’s an abak-something,” he tells his friends there, who cotton to the new invention, too. “ Abak what?” says the Greek, who takes this ancient version of the computer back to Greece with him. It’s really not so hard to imagine:Īn ancient Greek in Palestine sees a scribe doing sums by punching holes in sand and is impressed. One can only assume that the 11th-century Rashi made such a mistake because by the time he lived, the rod-and-bead abacus had replaced the obsolete sand abacus.Īnd yet, if avak sofrim was the ancient rabbis’ technical term for the sand in a scribe’s box, it is perhaps not so unlikely that the Greeks took their word for abacus from it, after all - especially since we know of no parallel term from ancient Phoenician. Indeed, here “scribes’ dust” can mean only one thing: fine dirt or sand kept by a scribe, not in a jar to powder ink but in a box so that it can be used to write erasable and therefore impermanent words or sums. If writing in ink is forbidden on the Sabbath because it is permanent, how could dusting the ink to dry it be permitted? This makes no sense at all. However, a moment’s reflection should convince one that this is illogical. What does “scribes’ dust” mean in this passage? If you look up avak sofrim in a Hebrew dictionary, you will read: “A powder scattered by ancient scribes on ink to dry it.” In turn, this is based on traditional rabbinic interpretations of the phrase, such as Rashi’s comment that it refers to “the powdered dust in a scribe’s jar.” Writing with beverage, with fruit juice, in ordinary dirt, in scribes’ dust, or in anything impermanent is permitted.” “Writing with ink, with arsenic, with chalk, with tree gum, with copper sulfate, or with anything that leaves a impression is forbidden…. In a discussion of whether or not writing is permissible on the Sabbath, we read: ![]() This phrase is avak sofrim, literally “scribes’ dust,” and it occurs in a passage in the Mishnaic tractate of the Sabbath. Indeed, some dictionaries also give as a possible etymology for “abacus” the Phoenician cognate of abak, which means “sand.” (Ancient Hebrew and Phoenician were closely related Semitic languages.) This would seem a more plausible derivation, were it not for a curious and generally misunderstood Hebrew phrase that we find in the Talmud. Why would they have taken the abacus, or even just a word for it, from the Jews? Once a computation was finished, it could be erased by smoothing out the sand again in preparation for the next sum.īut even if the rod-and-bead abacus, which was invented only in the Middle Ages, was the sand abacus, why connect the latter with Hebrew avak? Although the ancient Greeks absorbed much science and technology from the Middle East, this came to them mostly through the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Instead of wooden or metal rods representing columns for ones, tens, hundreds, thousands and so on, vertical lines were drawn in the sand instead of counters or beads sliding on the rods, holes were punched on these lines by a finger. In its more refined form (for one always could improvise in any loose or sandy soil, which must be how the oldest abacuses originated), it consisted of a shallow box filled with sand. To be more precise, the ancient abacus, which probably was invented in Babylonia, worked on the same principle as does an abacus today, but it looked quite different. The Greek word abax has as one of its senses ‘a board sprinkled with sand or dust for drawing geometric diagrams.’ This board is a relative of the abacus familiar to us.” “Originally, the abacus was, in fact, dusty…. ![]()
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