Counting with your hands…
(somewhere in 18th-century Italy)
I stumbled across these lovely images today… from an 18th century Italian book entitled Scoperta della chironomia, ossia, Dell’arte di gestire con le mani by Vicenzo Requeno, a Spanish monk living in Italy. The book examines the gestural techniques as recounted in various Greek and Latin authors, concentrating on representing numbers with the hand.
(source)