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c. 224-383 CE (Bakhshali manuscript)Primary source · 2 sourcesWell documented

The Bakhshali Manuscript Preserves the World's Oldest Zero

Radiocarbon dating at Oxford pushes a placeholder symbol back to the third or fourth century, centuries earlier than assumed

On the timeline · around c. 224-383 CE (Bakhshali manuscript) · The Kushan and Satavahana AgeThe Kushan and Satavahana AgeThe Gupta Golden Age and Early Medieval IndiaThe Bakhshali Manuscript Preserves the World's Oldest Zero100 CE150 CE200 CE250 CE300 CE350 CE400 CE

Quick facts

Manuscript
Bakhshali manuscript, discovered 1881 near Peshawar
Radiocarbon dating
Oldest folios c. 224-383 CE (Bodleian Libraries, 2017)
Key mathematician
Aryabhata, Aryabhatiya composed c. 499 CE
Aryabhata's value of pi
3.1416, accurate to four decimal places

What happened

The Bakhshali manuscript, a birch-bark mathematical text discovered near Peshawar in 1881 and held by Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, contains hundreds of dot symbols used as a placeholder zero within a positional number system. In 2017, radiocarbon dating conducted by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, found that the manuscript's oldest folios date to as early as the third or fourth century CE, roughly five centuries earlier than scholars had previously assumed, and older than a ninth-century zero inscription on a temple wall in Gwalior that had previously been considered the oldest confirmed placeholder zero in India. The manuscript itself is a composite: carbon dating showed its various birch-bark leaves span nearly 500 years, with some material from the third or fourth century and other pages added as late as the eighth to tenth centuries, meaning it was compiled and recopied over a very long period rather than written at a single moment. Roughly two centuries after the manuscript's earliest layers, the mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata, working at Kusumapura near the Gupta capital around 499 CE, used a positional decimal system in his treatise the Aryabhatiya, calculating pi to four decimal places as 3.1416 and explaining that the apparent westward motion of the stars comes from the earth's own rotation.

Why it matters

A functioning zero as a placeholder digit is a prerequisite for the positional decimal number system used worldwide today. The Bakhshali dating establishes that this mathematical tool was already in written use in the Indian subcontinent centuries before it reached the Islamic world and, eventually, medieval Europe. Aryabhata's work shows the same numerical tradition being applied to serious astronomical calculation within the Gupta intellectual environment.

How we know

The Bakhshali dating comes from radiocarbon analysis of the manuscript's birch-bark material conducted by the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford; Aryabhata's mathematical claims are preserved in his own surviving treatise, the Aryabhatiya, composed around 499 CE.

Sources

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