The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c6.136

c6.136

Out of all these conflicting theories, and from all the resemblances seen or imagined between the numerals of the West and those of the East, what conclusions are we prepared to draw as the evidence now stands? Probably none that is satisfactory. Indeed, upon the evidence at hand we might properly feel that everything points to the numerals as being substantially indigenous to India. And why should this not be the case? If the king Srong-tsan-Gampo (639 A.D.), the founder of Lhāsa,¹ could have set about to devise a new alphabet for Tibet, and if the Siamese, and the Singhalese, and the Burmese, and other peoples in the East, could have created alphabets of their own, why should not the numerals also have been fashioned by some temple school, or some king, or some merchant guild? By way of illustration, there are shown in the table on page 36 certain systems of the East, and while a few resemblances are evident, it is also evident that the creators of each system endeavored to find original forms that should not be found in other systems. This, then, would seem to be a fair interpretation of the evidence. A human mind cannot readily create simple forms that are absolutely new; what it fashions will naturally resemble what other minds have fashioned, or what it has known through hearsay or through sight. A circle is one of the world's common stock of figures, and that it should mean twenty in Phœnicia and in India is hardly more surprising than that it signified ten at one time in Babylon.² It is therefore quite probable that an extraneous origin cannot be found for the very sufficient reason that none exists.