The growth of civilisation, as barter, trading, and taxes developed, required methods of record keeping.
Long before that, there was a need to describe “more than one”: caves, berries, people, birds, stones, goats, wolves, mammoths, rivers, hills. Communication began with gesture, then sound, then language, and finally symbols.
Knots were tied in fibres. Marks were made in the sand, on clay tablets, on leaves, on paper—and now, in the cloud.
These marks go back many millennia before the Common Era (BCE). We know this because archaeologists have found and dated such evidence.
Some prehistoric images, such as animal paintings over 40,000 years old, show early attempts to represent the world visually: these pictures also demonstrate the ability to count [129560].
Without recordings, we cannot know the sounds of early communication. What survives are marks—symbols left behind.
At some stage, counting definite “things” (legs, sacks, days, trees, stars) developed into locally agreed symbols. These symbols represented quantity: an abstraction, a way to describe “how many”.
The word “locally” is important. Systems for counting varied throughout the world. The Babylonians developed names and symbols for quantities up to 60. The Romans devised a system that could continue indefinitely (or until the tablet was too small), but both systems—and others—had serious disadvantages.
Somewhere in Asia, the idea of using a small set of symbols, repeated in an agreed way, became established. It enabled counting, and then adding, multiplying, dividing, square-rooting—and, since this is a “concise” history, much more besides.
This system spread westwards and northwards into Europe, and eventually across the world. It is now known as the Hindu–Arabic system. You, dear reader are well aware of it. You use it every day. The aim of this site is to provide background knowledge to enable you to pass all this on to those youngsters in your care: specifically with moveable digits: written as described in our URL.
The rest of the story is history. As promised: this a concise version. There are many references for further exploration—should you wish to pursue them.