Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/24

OF LONG AGO number names; but they still had no money, and a few such names were quite enough.

While the boys were counting to “two twos and one” in China and to “three threes and two” in Mesopotamia, Egyptian boys played under the palms where long before their time Menes had looked with pride upon his father’s hut. No longer, however, was there just a hut with a single room, for the world was growing still older, and the descendants of the Menes of long ago had now a house with two rooms, and the Menes of this time had learned a new way of counting. The people along the Nile had found that the fingers of one hand would help them with their numbers, and so they made new names as far as five, and Menes now counted “one, two, three, four, five, five and one, five and two,” and so on to “five fives and four”; and then he gave up and said “a great many.” He could count farther than the Chings and the An-ams, but “five fives and four” is only twenty-nine, and this does not seem very far to us. But this was long before people could read and write, when they used knives made of stone, and when they thought