OF LONG AGO
When Gupta grew a little older he learned of another kind of numerals. Some priests had seen these numerals cut on the walls of
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EARLY NUMERALS
Probable number forms from inscriptions on stone made in the third century B.C.
a cave where pilgrims often rested for the night. It is here that we have almost the
EARLY NUMERALS
Probable number forms from inscriptions made in a cave in India in the second century B.C.
first traces of our present system of writing numbers, and they are more than two thousand years old. There was no zero, however;
NUMBER STORIES
no one could write a number like 207 in the way that we write it, and so the figures were no better than those of Hippias, Daniel, or Titus, or even of Lugal, Ahmes, or Chang. Long after Gupta died, and about a thousand years ago, someone had the wisdom to invent the zero, and after that it was easy to write numbers as we write them to-day. About the time that the zero was invented there was born in the country near the Caspian Sea a boy whose parents named him after Mohammed (mò h m'ed), the great religious leader of the Arabs.
Little Mohammed was a very bright boy, and Moses his father let him study with one of those wise men who watched the stars and thus told the time, for clocks and watches were then unknown.
Mohammed became so well known as a scholar that while still a young man he was called to Bagdad (bag däd') to be the caliph's (k 'lif) astronomer. The caliphs were the kings of the country about the Tigris (t 'gr s) River, and many stories are told about them in the Arabian Nights Tales. These tales describe Bagdad at about the time that our
OF LONG AGO
Mohammed lived there, and they tell of Harun-al-Rashid (hä roon' är rà sh d'), a name which means Aaron the Just. Mohammed IP ME
O TV A9 .
ARABIC NUMERALS
Numerals from 1 to 9, with a dot for zero, as used bythe Arabs. They are not like the numerals that we sometimes call Arabic
the son of Moses knew Harun's son, and the two used to study and work together in the caliph's observatory at Bagdad.
Mohammed the son of Moses found the Arabs of Bagdad using numerals that were quite different from those used by us to-day. From certain wise men who came to Bagdad
HINDU NUMERALS
Numeralsfrom 1 to 9, with zero, used bythe Hindus and taken to Bagdad about 1150 years ago
from India about this time, however, Mohammed learned the numerals used in that country, and these were somewhat like ours. He believed that they were better than the
NUMBER STORIES
ones the Arabs used, and so he wrote a book about them. This book was taken to Europe bysome traveler and assisted in making known in that part of the world the numerals that we use. Because the numerals came to Europe from Arabia they were called Arabic numerals, but they were not used by the Arabs then nor have they been generally used by them since that time.
OLD EUROPEAN NUMERALS
Oldest example of our numerals known in any European manuscript. Thismanuscript was written in Spain in 976A.D.
In France nearly a thousand years ago there lived a boy named Gerbert (zh r bâr'). He was so promising as a student that the priests whose school he attended sent him to Spain with a nobleman whom they knew, so that he might learn still more from travel. There he probably met with Arabs who knew about the Hindu numerals, because part of Spain was then under Arab rule, and when 40