The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c11.9

c11.9

There was also a Bagdad merchant, one Abū 'l-Qāsim 'Obeidallāh ibn Aḥmed, better known by his Persian name Ibn Khordāḍbeh,³ who wrote about 850 A.D. a work entitled *Book of Roads and Provinces*⁴ in which the following graphic account appears:⁵ "The Jewish merchants speak Persian, Roman (Greek and Latin), Arabic, French, Spanish, and Slavic. They travel from the West to the East, and from the East to the West, sometimes by land, sometimes by sea. They take ship from France on the Western Sea, and they voyage to Farama (near the ruins of the ancient Pelusium); there they transfer their goods to caravans and go by land to Colzom (on the Red Sea). They there reëmbark on the Oriental (Red) Sea and go to Hejaz and to Jiddah, and thence to the Sind, India, and China. Returning, they bring back the products of the oriental lands. . . . These journeys are also made by land. The merchants, leaving France and Spain, cross to Tangier and thence pass through the African provinces and Egypt. They then go to Ramleh, visit Damascus, Kufa, Bagdad, and Basra, penetrate into Ahwaz, Fars, Kerman, Sind, and thus reach India and China." Such travelers, about 900 A.D., must necessarily have spread abroad a knowledge of all number systems used in recording prices or in the computations of the market. There is an interesting witness to this movement, a cruciform brooch now in the British Museum. It is English, certainly as early as the eleventh century, but it is inlaid with a piece of paste on which is the Mohammedan inscription, in Kufic characters, “There is no God but God.” How did such an inscription find its way, perhaps in the time of Alcuin of York, to England? And if these Kufic characters reached there, then why not the numeral forms as well?