The king and the rice

A long time ago, there was a king in India. The king’s favourite game was chess.

One day, a wise old man came to the palace and the king challenged him to game. The king promised the old man， “You can have any prize if you win the game.”

The old man said, “If I win the game, I’d like one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two for the second, four for the third, and then double the amount for each of the rest of the squares.”

“Is that all? ” asked the king. “Wouldn’t you like gold or silver instead?”

“No, just rice,” replied the old man.

The king and the old man played the game for a long time. Finally, the old man won. So the king ordered his men to collect a bag of rice. He put one grain on the first square, two on the second, and so on. The king quickly realized the problem -- even with all the rice in the country, he would still not have enough rice to put on all the squares!

Counting before numbers

Before the invention of written numbers, people used many different ways to count things.

At first, people used their fingers, and even their toes. However, they could only count small numbers in this way.

After that, they began to make small marks on sticks and bones.

This helped them count bigger numbers. They used them to count things like the days of the month, the amount of food and the number of animals they had.

Then people began to use tokens made from clay or small stones. This helped them count even bigger numbers. They often put the tokens on pieces of string so that they could carry them around easily. This developed into tools like the abacus.

Finally, people began to develop systems of written marks to show different numbers, and this led to the Hindu-Arabic system (0-9). We are still using this system today.