What is the history of the tally system?

Answer 1

Tallying is among the earliest methods of keeping a record of quantities and appears in many early cultures. Artifacts from over 30,000 years ago have distinctive tally marks on them. Of course, we don't know what purpose the tallies served, but they may have been for keeping records of quantities, such as of animals. Now we must ask ourselves whether a tally system is really a counting system. Think about it this way. If a tally system were used to keep track of a flock of sheep, then one would place a single mark to represent a single animal. Then we would let the sheep go about grazing in the field. When the sheep return in the evening, we would cross out the individual marks for each sheep that has come back. Any marks remaining would indicate that some sheep were missing. However, since this is only a straight comparison between two sets of objects, the marks and the sheep, it does not express any idea of the actual number of sheep. There is no counting, and there are no numbers, such as three or seven. At some point very early in human development, however, another idea sprung up. This was the notion of creating different number words for things, depending on the context. For example, there might be one word to represent the idea of four people and another word to represent four trees. From this, the abstract idea of a number developed, meaning that humans realized that three fish and three stones had something in common and this commonality was their "threeness." This idea was then incorporated into a number system, giving birth to the world of mathematics.