Historical Background of Statistics

·       ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

-         Used pictorial representations to record numbers of people, animals, and inanimate objects on skins, slabs, or sticks of wood and the walls of caves.

·       BABYLONIAN

-         Before 3000 B.C. they used small clay tablets to record tabulations of agriculture yields and of commodities bartered or sold.

-         Records of population

·       EGYPTIANS

-         In the 31st century B.C. they analyzed the population and material wealth of their country before beginning to build pyramids.

-         The Egyptians conducted their inquiries into the occupation of their people.

·       BIBLICAL BOOKS

-         Biblical book of Numbers and 1 Chronicles are primarily statistical works, the former containing two separate censuses of the Israelites and the latter describing the material wealth of various Jewish tribe.

-         Censuses were undertaken by Moses in 1491 B.C. and by King David in 1017 B.C.

·       CHINA

-         Statistics in China can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) where early forms of data collection were used for administrative purposes, such as population censuses and resource inventories.

·       ANCIENT GREEKS

-         Held censuses to be used as bases for taxation as early as 594 B.C.

-         Classical Greeks took censuses in times of stress, carefully counting the adult male citizens in wartime and of the general populace when the food supply was endangered.

·       ROMAN EMPIRE

-         First government to gather extensive data about the population, area, and wealth of the territories that it controlled.

-         The Romans registered adult males and their properties for military and administrative purposes.

-         Servinus Tullius, who ruled as the sixth King of Rome from 578 to 534 B.C. was given credit for instituting the gathering of population data.

·       CAROLINGIAN KINGS

-         Pepins the Short in 758 and Charlemagne in 762 ordered surveys of ecclesiastical holdings.

·       ENGLAND

-         Following the Norman Quest in England in 1066, William I, King of England ordered a census to be taken, the information gathered in this census, conducted in 1086 was recorded in the Doomsday Book.

-         Registration of deaths and births was begun in England in the early 16th century.

-         In 1662 the first noteworthy statistical study of population, Observations on the London Bills of Mortality.

·       BRESLAU, GERMANY

-         In 1691 English astronomer Edmond Halley as a basis for the earliest mortality table.

-         19th century with the application of the scientific method to all phenomena in the natural and social sciences, investigators recognized the need to reduce information to numerical values.

·       AT PRESENT

-         Statistics is a reliable means of describing accurately the values of economic, political, social, psychological, biological, and physical data and serves as a tool to correlate and analyze such data.