الجذور الأولى للعدّ والحساب في الحضارات القديمة وادي الرافدين نموذجاً

Abstract

Man's innate tendency to love possession was an important motivation towards his quest to search for any means by which he could symbolically represent or embody his possessions. He grew very slowly to be at the forefront of all sciences from time immemorial, and no proof of that is the penetration of account into most of the daily affairs of human beings, regardless of the degree of their sophistication or decadence. It is not easy to determine the length of time it took the first human to devise methods and methods of counting and arithmetic, and all he could do at that time was to estimate the quantity of anything by little or much without committing to a weight or number. There is no doubt that reaching the adoption of certain methods and tools to carry out the counting and calculation operations was a revolution in human life, and perhaps the first attempts made by man in this regard were those signs and signals that he left on the walls of caves and on rocks and stones, and the grooves that he used to make on the bones of some Animals, sticks and tree trunks, which indicate the extent of his interest in counting and arithmetic in a time that was previously invented for writing.