Numerals · a Light

Your digits came west through the Maghrib and Spain

The numerals reached the Arabic speaking world from India, and Arabic writers called them the Indian figures, which is what they were. They then split into two families of shapes. In the east, from Egypt to Iran, the forms still printed on Egyptian number plates and Iranian banknotes took hold. In the west, in the Maghrib and al-Andalus, a different set developed, called ghubar or dust figures after the boards they were written on. Those are the ones Europe learned. Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, met them in Catalonia in the tenth century, and Fibonacci learned them properly as a boy at Bugia on the coast of what is now Algeria, where his father was a customs official.

Maghrib to Europe · tenth to thirteenth centuries