Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/21

NUMBER STORIES are many sheep out there; drive them back.” But really there were only a few sheep, for neither An-am nor Bel could count beyond three, and all larger numbers were called “many.” Nevertheless Bel and An-am knew the sheep so well that they could tell if one was missing, just as a good shepherd dog to-day knows if one of his flock has gone astray. So An-am and Bel could count “one, two, three, many,” and that was all they needed to know about arithmetic.

While Ching was playing in the forest at the foot of Mount Yu, and An-am was helping to watch the flocks that fed near the Euphrates (ū frā'tḕz), another boy was living on the banks of the Nile in ancient Egypt. This boy’s name was Menes, and he lived not far from the place where now the enormous dam holds back the waters of the great river. The little hut in which Menes lived was the grandest house that he or his father or his mother ever saw, and yet it had only a single room, and this was smaller than the schoolroom in which you study arithmetic.

For this was thousands of years ago, long before people had real houses, long before