Back to the abacus in Tbilisi, Georgia

In a local office supplies store, two Georgian women - Lala and Gulu - still practice the art of the counting using an abacus, which is quite commonly used in Asia.

The abacus is a counting frame, made of metal rods and beads of two colours. There are differing views on the origin of the counter abacus; some say it originated in India, Mesopotamia or Egypt, whereas others say it was a Chinese instrument and that Christians brought it to the East. The women explained that their frame is a Russian abacus, called a schoty.

The Russian abacus has nine wires with ten beads on each of the eight wires and four beads on the ninth wire (for quarter-ruble fractions). The middle two beads on each wire are different colours to stand out from the remaining beads. This helps the user remember what they have just counted.

The Chinese abacus has a wooden frame in the middle that separates beads into two portions. The upper portion contains two beads and the lower portion has a set of five beads. The Chinese abacus can perform functions such as square root and cube root, in addition to the usual calculations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Unlike the calculator, the abacus doesn’t actually count. The user is adept at mental arithmetic and uses the abacus as a visual aid to remember the calculations.

The Georgian women were introduced to the abacus at school. For suspicious customers, their back-up is a calculator, because they do not have a computerized till or cash register. However, they were significantly faster at calculating a range of numerical tasks with their abacus than with their calculator.

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