The question is often asked, why did not these new numerals attract more immediate attention? Why did they have to wait until the sixteenth century to be generally used in business and in the schools? In reply it may be said that in their elementary work the schools always wait upon the demands of trade. That work which pretends to touch the life of the people must come reasonably near doing so. Now the computations of business until about 1500 did not demand the new figures, for two reasons: First, cheap paper was not known. Paper-making of any kind was not introduced into Europe until
the twelfth century, and cheap paper is a product of the nineteenth. Pencils, too, of the modern type, date only from the sixteenth century. In the second place, modern methods of operating, particularly of multiplying and dividing (operations of relatively greater importance when all measures were in compound numbers requiring reductions at every step), were not yet invented. The old plan required the erasing of figures after they had served their purpose, an operation very simple with counters, since they could be removed. The new plan did not as easily permit this. Hence we find the new numerals very tardily admitted to the counting-house, and not welcomed with any enthusiasm by teachers.[[555]]
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,[[556]] 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 geometria 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 forms[[557]] 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.[[558]] They appear about a century later in a work[[559]] 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.
A graffito in Arabic on this pillar has the date 349 A.H., which corresponds to 961 A.D.[[560]] For the dating of Latin documents the Arabic forms were used as early as the thirteenth century.[[561]]
On the early use of these numerals in Europe the only scientific study worthy the name is that made by Mr. G. F. Hill of the British Museum.[[562]] From his investigations it appears that the earliest occurrence of a date in these numerals on a coin is found in the reign of Roger of Sicily in 1138.[[563]] Until recently it was thought that the earliest such date was 1217 A.D. for an Arabic piece and 1388 for a Turkish one.[[564]] Most of the seals and medals containing dates that were at one time thought to be very early have been shown by Mr. Hill to be of relatively late workmanship. There are, however, in European manuscripts, numerous instances of the use of these numerals before the twelfth century. Besides the example in the Codex Vigilanus, another of the tenth century has been found in the St. Gall MS. now in the University Library at Zürich, the forms differing materially from those in the Spanish codex.
The third specimen in point of time in Mr. Hill's list is from a Vatican MS. of 1077. The fourth and fifth specimens are from the Erlangen MS. of Boethius, of the same
(eleventh) century, and the sixth and seventh are also from an eleventh-century MS. of Boethius at Chartres. These and other early forms are given by Mr. Hill in this table, which is reproduced with his kind permission.
Earliest Manuscript Forms
