A Concise History of Science in India c7.s2.t2.2

c7.s2.t2.2

Like the Egyptians, the Vedic Hindus adopted 10 as the basis of numeration and developed a great interest in thinking out and naming large numbers. The Greeks, on the other hand, fought shy of large numbers and their terminology hardly took them beyond the ‘myriad’ (10⁴). The Egyptians freely dealt with large numbers on the decimal scale, such as hundred, thousand, million, tens of million and so on and had meaningful Hieroglyphic symbols to express them. The same is true of the Vedic Hindus. The various recensions of the *Yajurveda Saṃhitā* give names to numbers as large as 10¹². The *Taittirīya Saṃhitā*a gives the following denominations: *eka* (1), *daśa* (10), *śata* (10²), *sahasra* (10³), *ayuta* (10⁴), *niyuta* (10⁵), *prayuta* (10⁶), *arbuda* (10⁷), *nyarbuda* (10⁸), *samudra* (10⁹), *madhya* (10¹⁰), *anta* (10¹¹) and *parārdha* (10¹²). The same is repeated in the *Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa* with further extensions. The following passage from the *Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa*b will give an idea of the context and the manner in which large numbers were introduced: