ABSTRACT
At the outset I confess that I believe the general tradition, which has it that the nine numerals used in decimal position and using zero for an empty position were received by the Arabs from India. All the oriental testimonies speak in favor of this line of transmission, beginning from Severus Sebokht in 662] through the Arabic-Islamic arithmeticians themselves and to Muslim historians and other writers. I do not touch here the problem whether the Indian system itself was influenced, or instigated, by earlier Greek material; at least, this seems improbable in view of what we know about Greek number notation.
