Zero's Journey West: From Bharat to Arabia to Europe

How Al-Khwarizmi and others transmitted India's gift to the world

Trace the transmission of zero from India to Baghdad's House of Wisdom, through North Africa, and finally to Europe where it faced centuries of resistance.

The Delegation at the Caliph's Court

In 773 CE, an Indian embassy entered the throne room of Caliph al-Manṣūr in the newly built city of Baghdad. The capital was eleven years old. Its round walls were still raw, the Tigris ran past unbridged, and the caliph was assembling a library and a court of scholars on a scale the Mediterranean had not seen since Alexandria. The delegation was led by an astronomer-mathematician whose Sanskrit name Kanaka the Arab chroniclers would render as Kankah. He carried palm-leaf manuscripts, bound and tied. One of them, the later historians Ibn al-Adami and al-Bīrūnī would identify, was a copy of Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta, the 628 CE work that contained the first systematic rules for arithmetic with zero.

Al-Manṣūr ordered the text translated from Sanskrit into Arabic. The translation became known as the Sindhind, an Arabic corruption of the Sanskrit siddhānta. For the next two centuries it was the foundation on which Arab astronomy and arithmetic were built.

Look at the numbers on a contract or a bank statement today. You are looking at Indian numerals. The shapes have been rounded and squared by a thousand years of copying. The language you use to speak them is European. But the ideas are Indian, and the journey from Bhillamāla in Rajasthan to a keyboard in your hand runs through three civilizations and takes nine hundred years. It begins with Kankah's leather satchel in al-Manṣūr's court.

The Man Whose Name Became a Verb

Fifty years after Kankah's mission, a Persian scholar named Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, attached to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under Caliph al-Ma'mūn around 820 CE, became the first person outside India to write a systematic guide to the Indian number system in a non-Indian language. His treatise was titled Kitāb al-ḥisāb al-hindī, the Book on Reckoning in the Indian Manner. He wrote a second book, Kitāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala, from which the word algebra would eventually be derived.