numeral

I got nerdsniped by the development of the numerals we use last week. It’s difficult to find images of historical numerals! This is the best I was able to reconstruct, with the link between the Shang numerals and the Brahmi numerals only speculative:

Photo of a sheet of paper with a table of written depictions of historical numerals from 0 to 9, with the headings “Shang c. 8700”, “Brahmi c. 10100”, “c. 10600”, “Persian c. 11000”, “Andalusian c. 11400”, and “Typeset c. 11540”

(Dates are in HE for easier parsing across the 1 CE boundary.)

Even though the link between Shang and Brahmi is speculative, it’s startling how strong the link is between Shang and modern Chinese numerals.