of Indian commerce and culture. Boethius could very
well have learned one or more forms of Hindu numerals from some traveler or
merchant.

To justify this statement it is necessary to speak more fully of these
relations between the Far East and Europe. It is true that we have no
records of the interchange of learning, in any large way, between eastern
Asia and central Europe in the century preceding the time of Boethius. But
it is one of the mistakes of scholars to believe that they are the sole
transmitters of knowledge. {74} As a matter of fact there is abundant
reason for believing that Hindu numerals would naturally have been known to
the Arabs, and even along every trade route to the remote west, long before
the zero entered to make their place-value possible, and that the
characters, the methods of calculating, the improvements that took place
from time to time, the zero when it appeared, and the customs as to solving
business problems, would all have been made known from generation to
generation along these same trade routes from the Orient to the Occident.
It must always be kept in mind that it was to the tradesman and the
wandering scholar that the spread of such learning was due, rather than to
the school man. Indeed, Avicenna[289] (980-1037 A.D.) in a short biography
of himself relates that when his people were living at Bokh[=a]ra his
father sent him to the house of a grocer to learn the Hindu art of
reckoning, in which this grocer (oil dealer, possibly) was expert. Leonardo
of Pisa, too, had a similar training.

The whole question of this spread of mercantile knowledge along the trade
routes is so connected with the [.g]ob[=a]r numerals, the Boethius
question, Gerbert, Leonardo of Pisa, and other names and events, that a
digression for its consideration now becomes necessary.[290]

{75}

Even in very remote times, before the Hindu numerals were sculptured in the
cave of N[=a]n[=a] Gh[=a]t, there were trade relations between Arabia and
India. Indeed, long before the Aryans went to India the great Turanian race
had spread its civilization from the Mediterranean to the Indus.[291] At a
much later period the Arabs were the intermediaries between Egypt and Syria
on the west, and the farther Orient.[292] In the sixth century B.C.,
Hecataeus,[293] the father of geography, was acquainted not only with the
Mediterranean lands but with the countries as far as the Indus,[294] and in
Biblical times there were regula