The Number Zero Might Be Older Than We Thought

A new analysis of the ancient Indian Bakhshali manuscript suggests the numerical symbol zero, as we use it today, may be centuries older than previously believed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff.
In mathematics, zero has two meanings. It can mean nothing,
I eat, I have zero dollars in my bank account,
or it can serve as a placeholder that's part of
a larger number, indicating that it is a multiple of ten.
As Robert Kaplan details in his book The Nothing That

(00:24):
Is a Natural History of Zero, about five thousand years ago,
the ancient Sumerians, who lived in what is now a
rock came up with the basic concept of zero as
a placeholder instead of the zero that we used today,
though they drew complicated combinations of wedges, lines, and spaces
in clay tablets to indicate it. Kaplan explains that the

(00:47):
concept was adopted by the Babylonians, who passed it along
by way of the ancient Greeks to India, where Arab
traders picked it up and eventually brought it back to
medieval Europe. Somewhere along the way, the wedges that signified
zero the placeholder evolved into a solid dot, which was
the precursor of the zero that we know today. For

(01:09):
a long time, it was believed that the earliest example
of that was an inscription on the wall of a
temple of Guali, or India, which dates back to seventh
century CE. But now researchers have found evidence of an
even earlier example. The Bakshali Manuscript, and Indian mathematical text

(01:30):
written on seventy pieces of birch bark, was discovered back
in one by someone digging in the soil in the
village of Bakshali in what is now Pakistan. The exact
age of the manuscript has long been a subject of controversy,
but the most authoritative answer to date, based on an
analysis by Japanese scholar Toko Hayashi, seemed to place it

(01:55):
between seven hundred and eleven hundred CE. Recently, the University
of Oxford's Bodlian Libraries, which has possessed the manuscript since
nineteen o two, commissioned a carbon dating study of it.
The new study revealed that the manuscript actually may date
as far back as two hundred to three hundred CE,

(02:17):
making it the oldest example of the dot that later
evolved into zero now. According to Bodlian's press release, the
concept of zero as a number in its own right,
one with a value of nothing, didn't come along until
several centuries after the Bakshali Manuscript was written, it first
appears in a text by the Indian astronomer and mathematician

(02:42):
Rama Gupta. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger,
produced by Tristan McNeil, and For more on this and
other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.