Now in (where a longer quote is given) Ifrah tries to determine which Indian work is referred to.

Al-Mansur ordered this book to be translated into Arabic, and a work to be written, based on the translation, to give the Arabs a solid base for calculating the movements of the planets … … a person from India presented himself before the Caliph al-Mansur in the year who was well versed in the siddhanta method of calculation related to the movment of the heavenly bodies, and having ways of calculating equations based on the half-chord calculated in half-degrees … This is all contained in a work … from which he claimed to have taken the half-chord calculated for one minute. We quote from a work of al-Qifti Chronology of the scholarswritten around the end the 12 th century but quoting much earlier sources:.

This may have encouraged him to find out about the astronomy works of the Indians and in these, of course, he would find the arithmetic of the nine symbols.īy 776 AD the Arab empire was beginning to take shape and we have another reference to the transmission of Indian numerals. Severus Sebokht as a Christian bishop would have been interested in calculating the date of Easter (a problem to Christian churches for many hundreds of years). The passage itself, of course, would certainly suggest that few people in that part of the world knew anything of the system. This passage clearly indicates that knowledge of the Indian number system was known in lands soon to become part of the Arab world as early as the seventh century. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs.

I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, …, of their subtle discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass description. In 662 AD Severus Sebokht, a Nestorian bishop who lived in Keneshra on the Euphrates river, wrote:. The first sign that the Indian numerals were moving west comes from a source which predates the rise of the Arab nations. For example there were at least three different types of arithmetic used in Arab countries in the eleventh century: a system derived from counting on the fingers with the numerals written entirely in words, this finger-reckoning arithmetic was the system used for by the business community the sexagesimal system with numerals denoted by letters of the Arabic alphabet and the arithmetic of the Indian numerals and fractions with the decimal place-value system. Rather different number systems were used simultaneously in the Arabic world over a long period of time. There are other complications in the story, however, for it was not simply that the Arabs took over the Indian number system. Transmission to Europe came through this western Arabic route, coming into Europe first through Spain. By the western part of the Arabic world we mean the regions comprising mainly North Africa and Spain. The eastern and western parts of the Arabic world both saw separate developments of Indian numerals with relatively little interaction between the two. The story of this transmission is not, however, a simple one. However they were not transmitted directly from India to Europe but rather came first to the Arabic/Islamic peoples and from them to Europe. The Indian numerals discussed in our article Indian numerals form the basis of the European number systems which are now widely used.

187 in babylonian numerals