It is the belief of Old Babylonian scholars such as Carruccio that Old Babylonians "may have used the abacus for the operations of addition and subtraction however, this primitive device proved difficult to use for more complex calculations". Some scholars point to a character from the Babylonian cuneiform which may have been derived from a representation of the abacus. The period 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system. The user of an abacus is called an abacist. The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses and abaci in use. Greek ἄβαξ itself is probably a borrowing of a Northwest Semitic, perhaps Phoenician, word akin to Hebrew ʾābāq (אבק), "dust" (or in post-Biblical sense meaning "sand used as a writing surface"). Whereas the table strewn with dust definition is popular, there are those that do not place credence in this at all and in fact state that it is not proven. Alternatively, without reference to ancient texts on etymology, it has been suggested that it means "a square tablet strewn with dust", or "drawing-board covered with dust (for the use of mathematics)" (the exact shape of the Latin perhaps reflects the genitive form of the Greek word, ἄβακoς abakos). The Latin word came from Greek ἄβαξ abax which means something without base, and improperly, any piece of rectangular board or plank. The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus.
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