The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c11.82

c11.82

The question still to be settled is as to where he found these numerals. That he did not bring them from Spain is the opinion of a number of careful investigators.³ This is thought to be the more probable because most of the men who made Spain famous for learning lived after Gerbert was there. Such were Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) who lived at the beginning, and Gerber of Seville who flourished in the middle, of the eleventh century, and Abū Roshd (Averroës) who lived at the end of the twelfth.⁴ Others hold that his proximity to the Arabs for three years makes it probable that he assimilated some of their learning, in spite of the fact that the lines between Christian and Moor at that time were sharply drawn.¹ Writers fail, however, to recognize that a commercial numeral system would have been more likely to be made known by merchants than by scholars. The itinerant peddler knew no forbidden pale in Spain, any more than he has known one in other lands. If the ġobār numerals were used for marking wares or keeping simple accounts, it was he who would have known them, and who would have been the one rather than any Arab scholar to bring them to the inquiring mind of the young French monk. The facts that Gerbert knew them only imperfectly, that he used them solely for calculations, and that the forms are evidently like the Spanish ġobār, make it all the more probable that it was through the small tradesman of the Moors that this versatile scholar derived his knowledge. Moreover the part of the geometry bearing his name, and that seems unquestionably his, shows the Arab influence, proving that he at least came into contact with the transplanted Oriental learning, even though imperfectly.² There was also the persistent Jewish merchant trading with both peoples then as now, always alive to the acquiring of useful knowledge, and it would be very natural for a man like Gerbert to welcome learning from such a source.