Robert K. Englund

The First Representations of Numbers and the Development of the Number Concept

Due to early practice and habit we are so familiar with manipulating numbers that we hardly ever stop to think about the intellectual achievement represented by the detachment of the designation for a quantity from the counted object itself. Ethnological investigations of primitive peoples without an abstract number concept in our present sense first indicated that this separation must not be taken for granted. Despite this, archaeologists always assumed the existence of such a number concept when interpreting the oldest known written documents which come from the period between 3200 and 3000 B.C.