| Autor: |
Aczel, Debra G., Uk, Solang, Touch, Hab, Aczel, Miriam R. |
| Předmět: |
|
| Zdroj: |
Value Inquiry Book Series; 2023, Vol. 395, p221-232, 12p |
| Abstrakt: |
A stone stele code-named K-127 was discovered in 1891 on the east bank of the Mekong River in Sambaur district of Kratié province, Cambodia by the French governor of the province. A recent search to relocate the ancient temple where the stele was found showed only brushes and a piece of plain rock of similar colour to K-127. French epigraphist, George Coedès translated its inscriptions in 1930 and was astonished to find that it bears the number 604 of the śaka era which is equivalent to 682 CE. This is the first Khmer inscription that shows the date in numeral form. The top right corner of the stele had been broken when it was found, with the first eight lines of the inscriptions partly broken off on the right side. The zero on K-127 is two centuries older than the internationally accepted oldest Indian zero found in the city of Gwalior. In 1931 Coedès published an article to debunk the belief that our modern decimal number system with the numeral zero as place holder originated in Europe from the Greeks. The origin of the Indian zero comes from the Buddhist logic of catuskoti or tetralemma. To underline the logic, a brief discussion between the wandering ascetic Vacchagotta and Buddha is presented. During the Cambodian civil war in the 1970s, the short-lived Cambodian republican government moved many ancient artefacts to warehouses of Angkor Conservation in Siem Reap for safe keeping. When the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975, nobody knows what happened to K-127. It was presumed lost. In 2013, an American mathematics professor who had been travelling the world in search of the origin of the numeral zero in our decimal number system, learned about K-127. He set off again on his search through Southeast Asia, and eventually found K-127 in a shed of Angkor Conservation. He organized with the ministry of Culture and Fine Arts to have the stele brought back to the National Museum in Phnom Penh. In July 2018, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England announced in newspapers and through YouTube the results of their C-14 analysis of the Bakhshali manuscript found in 1881 in Bakhshali village near Peshawar in today's Pakistan. The age of the manuscript from the C-14 test spans from the third to the tenth century CE. The results were immediately rejected by five experts in Indian mathematics, historians of Indian math, and a specialist in Indian palaeography. So long as the age of the Bakhshali manuscript remains unsettled, K-127 can rightfully claim to bear the world's oldest zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
Complementary Index |
| Externí odkaz: |
|
