The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c10.2

c10.2

If the numerals had their origin in India, as seems most probable, when did the Arabs come to know of them? It is customary to say that it was due to the influence of Mohammedanism that learning spread through Persia and Arabia; and so it was, in part. But learning was already respected in these countries long before Mohammed appeared, and commerce flourished all through this region. In Persia, for example, the reign of Khosrū Nuśīrwān,¹ the great contemporary of Justinian the lawmaker, was characterized not only by an improvement in social and economic conditions, but by the cultivation of letters. Khosrū fostered learning, inviting to his court scholars from Greece, and encouraging the introduction of culture from the West as well as from the East. At this time Aristotle and Plato were translated, and portions of the *Hito-padēśa*, or Fables of Pilpay, were rendered from the Sanskrit into Persian. All this means that some three centuries before the great intellectual ascendancy of Bagdad a similar fostering of learning was taking place in Persia, and under pre-Mohammedan influences.