The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c12.56

c12.56

Aside from their use in the early treatises on the new art of reckoning, the numerals appeared from time to time in the dating of manuscripts and upon monuments. The oldest definitely dated European document known to contain the numerals is a Latin manuscript,¹ the *Codex Vigilanus*, written in the Albelda Cloister not far from Logroño in Spain, in 976 a.d. The nine characters (of *ġobār* type), without the zero, are given as an addition to the first chapters of the third book of the *Origines* by Isidorus of Seville, in which the Roman numerals are under discussion. Another Spanish copy of the same work, of 992 a.d., contains the numerals in the corresponding section. The writer ascribes an Indian origin to them in the following words: "Item de figuris arithmeticę. Scire debemus in Indos subtilissimum ingenium habere et ceteras gentes eis in arithmetica et geometrią et ceteris liberalibus disciplinis concedere. Et hoc manifestum est in nobem figuris, quibus designant unumquemque gradum cuiuslibet gradus. Quarum hec sunt forma." The nine *ġobār* characters follow. Some of the abacus forms² previously given are doubtless also of the tenth century. The earliest Arabic documents containing the numerals are two manuscripts of 874 and 888 a.d.³ They appear about a century later in a work⁴ written at Shiraz in 970 a.d. There is also an early trace of their use on a pillar recently discovered in a church apparently destroyed as early as the tenth century, not far from the Jeremias Monastery, in Egypt.