Who made the abacus?

Answer 1

1. The abacus was invented by the ancient Chinese (Not true; see 3 below). Different types of abacuses have been invented by many others such as the Romans and Egyptians.

2. Actually it's often wrongly attributed to china. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. (Sort of; see 3 below)

3. The first constrained bead abacus was the Roman Hand Abacus. The Chinese learned of the Roman Hand Abacus through trade with Rome over the Silk Roads. But they thought it an inferior device and ignored it for over a thousand years. Then an interest in rapid calculation with the rise in business caused them to develop the bamboo rod constrained bead abacus based on the Roman Hand Abacus model.

The Romans, in turn, great engineers and copiers that they were, used the Babylonian's line abacus in both decimal and duodecimal modes. The only extant line abacus is The Salamis Tablet, circa 300 BC, but the design was used by the Babylonians and Sumerians as early as 2300 BC.

BTW, the line abacus can do all four arithmetic operations on numbers in exponential form with bases of 10, 12, or 60 (decimal, duodecimal, sexagesimal). Pebbles could be used as tokens to represent the numbers. In Latin the word for pebbles is "calculos", from which we get words like calculate and calculus.

Answer 2

the babylonians