The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c7.47

c7.47

At the opening of the next century (c. 620 A.D.) Bāṇa⁶ wrote of Subandhus’s *Vāsavadattā* as a celebrated work, and mentioned that the stars dotting the sky are here compared with zeros, these being points as in the modern Arabic system. On the other hand, a strong argument against any Hindu knowledge of the symbol zero at this time is the fact that about 700 a.d. the Arabs overran the province of Sind and thus had an opportunity of knowing the common methods used there for writing numbers. And yet, when they received the complete system in 776 they looked upon it as something new.¹ Such evidence is not conclusive, but it tends to show that the complete system was probably not in common use in India at the beginning of the eighth century. On the other hand, we must bear in mind the fact that a traveler in Germany in the year 1700 would probably have heard or seen nothing of decimal fractions, although these were perfected a century before that date. The élite of the mathematicians may have known the zero even in Āryabhaṭa's time, while the merchants and the common people may not have grasped the significance of the novelty until a long time after. On the whole, the evidence seems to point to the west coast of India as the region where the complete system was first seen.² As mentioned above, traces of the numeral words with place value, which do not, however, absolutely require a decimal place-system of symbols, are found very early in Cambodia, as well as in India.