Hardware
The basic equipment for carrying out rod calculus is a bundle of counting rods and a counting board. The counting rods are usually made of bamboo sticks, about 12 cm- 15 cm in length, 2mm to 4 mm diameter, sometimes from animal bones, or ivory and jade (for well-heeled merchants). A counting board could be a table top, a wooden board with or without grid, on the floor or on sand.
In 1971 Chinese archaeologists unearthed a bundle of well preserved animal bone counting rods stored in a silk pouch from a tomb in Qian Yang county in Shanxi province, dated back to the first half of Han dynasty(206 BC – 8AD). In 1975 a bundle of bamboo counting rods was unearthed.
The use of counting rods for rod calculus flourished in the Warring States, although no archaeological artefacts were found earlier than the Western Han Dynasty (the first half of Han dynasty; however, archaeologists did unearth software artefacts of rod calculus dated back to the Warring States); since the rod calculus software must have gone along with rod calculus hardware, there is no doubt that rod calculus was already flourishing during the Warring States more than 2,200 years ago.
Read more about this topic: Rod Calculus
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