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The Ancient Romans developed the Roman hand abacus, a portable, but less capable, base-10 version of the previous Babylonian abacus. It was the first portable calculating device for engineers, merchants and presumably tax collectors. It greatly reduced the time needed to perform the basic operations of arithmetic using Roman numerals. As Karl Menninger says on page 315 of his book,〔Menninger, Karl, 1992. Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers, German to English translation, M.I.T., 1969, Dover Publications.〕 "For more extensive and complicated calculations, such as those involved in Roman land surveys, there was, in addition to the hand abacus, a true reckoning board with unattached counters or pebbles. The Etruscan cameo and the Greek predecessors, such as the Salamis Tablet and the Darius Vase, give us a good idea of what it must have been like, although no actual specimens of the true Roman counting board are known to be extant. But language, the most reliable and conservative guardian of a past culture, has come to our rescue once more. Above all, it has preserved the fact of the ''unattached'' counters so faithfully that we can discern this more clearly than if we possessed an actual counting board. What the Greeks called ''psephoi'', the Romans called ''calculi''. The Latin word ''calx'' means 'pebble' or 'gravel stone'; ''calculi'' are thus little stones (used as counters)." Both the Roman abacus and the Chinese suanpan have been used since ancient times. With one bead above and four below the bar, the systematic configuration of the Roman abacus is coincident to the modern Japanese soroban, although the soroban is historically derived from the suanpan. ==Layout== The Late Roman hand abacus shown here as a reconstruction contains seven longer and seven shorter grooves used for whole number counting, the former having up to four beads in each, and the latter having just one. The rightmost two grooves were for fractional counting. The abacus was made of a metal plate where the beads ran in slots. The size was such that it could fit in a modern shirt pocket. 50 and 20 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| MM CM XM M C X I Ө Ɛ --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Ɔ |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| | | |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| | | |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| | | |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| |O| 2 |O| |O| ''The diagram is based on the Roman hand abacus at the London Science Museum.'' The lower groove marked I indicates units, X tens, and so on up to millions. The beads in the upper shorter grooves denote fives—five units, five tens, ''etc.'', essentially in a bi-quinary coded decimal place value system. Computations are made by means of beads which would probably have been slid up and down the grooves to indicate the value of each column. The upper slots contained a single bead while the lower slots contained four beads, the only exceptions being the two rightmost columns, column 2 marked Ө and column 3 with three symbols down the side of a single slot or beside three separate slots with Ɛ, 3 or S or a symbol like the £ sign but without the horizontal bar beside the top slot, a backwards C beside the middle slot and a 2 symbol beside the bottom slot, depending on the example abacus and the source which could be Friedlein,〔 Menninger〔 or Ifrah.〔 These latter two slots are for mixed-base math, a development unique to the Roman hand abacus〔(【引用サイトリンク】 author=Stephenson, Steve )〕 described in following sections. The longer slot with five beads below the Ө position allowed for the counting of 1/12 of a whole unit called an ''uncia'' (from which the English words ''inch'' and ''ounce'' are derived), making the abacus useful for Roman measures and Roman currency. The first column was either a single slot with 4 beads or 3 slots with one, one and two beads respectively top to bottom. In either case, three symbols were included beside the single slot version or one symbol per slot for the three slot version. Many measures were aggregated by twelfths. Thus the Roman pound ('libra'), consisted of 12 ounces (''unciae'') (1 uncia = 28 grams). A measure of volume, ''congius'', consisted of 12 heminae (1 hemina = 0.273 litres). The Roman foot (''pes''), was 12 inches (''unciae'') (1 uncia = 2.43 cm). The ''actus'', the standard furrow length when plowing, was 120 ''pedes''. There were however other measures in common use - for example the ''sextarius'' was two ''heminae''. The ''as'', the principal copper coin in Roman currency, was also divided into 12 unciae. Again, the abacus was ideally suited for counting currency. == Symbols and usage == The first column was arranged either as a single slot with three different symbols or as three separate slots with one, one and two beads or counters respectively and a distinct symbol for each slot. It is most likely that the rightmost slot or slots were used to enumerate fractions of an ''uncia'' and these were, from top to bottom, 1/2 s, 1/4 s and 1/12 s of an ''uncia''. The upper character in this slot (or the top slot where the rightmost column is three separate slots) is the character most closely resembling that used to denote a ''semuncia'' or 1/24. The name ''semuncia'' denotes 1/2 of an ''uncia'' or 1/24 of the base unit, the ''As''. Likewise, the next character is that used to indicate a ''sicilicus'' or 1/48 of an ''As'', which is 1/4 of an ''uncia''. These two characters are to be found in the table of Roman fractions on page 75 of Graham Flegg's〔Flegg, Graham, "Numbers, Their History and Meaning" ISBN 0-14-022564-1〕 book. Finally, the last or lower character is most similar but not identical to the character in Flegg's table to denote 1/144 of an ''As'', the ''dimidio sextula'', which is the same as 1/12 of an ''uncia''. This is however even more strongly supported by (Gottfried Friedlein )〔Friedlein, Gottfried, Die Zahlzeichen und das elementare rechnen der Griechen und Römer und des Christlichen Abendlandes vom 7. bis 13. Jahrhundert (Erlangen, 1869)〕 in the table at the end of the book which summarizes the use of a very extensive set of alternative formats for different values including that of fractions. In the entry in this table numbered 14 referring back to (Zu) 48, he lists different symbols for the ''semuncia'' (1/24), the ''sicilicus'' (1/48), the ''sextula'' (1/72), the ''dimidia sextula'' (1/144), and the ''scriptulum'' (1/288). Of prime importance, he specifically notes the formats of the ''semuncia'', ''sicilicus'' and ''sextula'' as used on the Roman bronze abacus, "auf dem chernan abacus". The ''semuncia'' is the symbol resembling a capital "S", but he also includes the symbol that resembles a numeral three with horizontal line at the top, the whole rotated 180 degrees. It is these two symbols that appear on samples of abacus in different museums. The symbol for the ''sicilicus'' is that found on the abacus and resembles a large right single quotation mark spanning the entire line height. The most important symbol is that for the ''sextula'', which resembles very closely a cursive digit 2. Now, as stated by Friedlein, this symbol indicates the value of 1/72 of an ''As''. However, he stated specifically in the penultimate sentence of (section 32 on page 23 ), the two beads in the bottom slot each have a value of 1/72. This would allow this slot to represent only 1/72 (i.e. 1/6 × 1/12 with one bead) or 1/36 (i.e. 2/6 × 1/12 = 1/3 × 1/12 with two beads) of an ''uncia'' respectively. This contradicts all existing documents that state this lower slot was used to count thirds of an ''uncia'' (i.e. 1/3 and 2/3 × 1/12 of an ''As''. This results in two opposing interpretations of this slot, that of Friedlein and that of many other experts such as Ifrah,〔Ifrah, Georges, "The Universal History of Numbers" ISBN 1-86046-324-X〕 and Menninger〔 who propose the one and two thirds usage. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Roman abacus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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