Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> writes:

> On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 03:51 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Colin Putney wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Friday, August 22, 2003, at 02:22 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
>>>
>>>> And now that we got this let's go back to the roots for real. Why
>>>> do we
>>>> actually write numbers big-endian? ;-)
>>>
>>> Well, actually we write them little-endian in a right-to-left
>>> script.  Whoever stole arabic numerals from the arabs apparently
>>> didn't bother to do the required digit-swapping when using them
>>> with the Roman alphabet. Perhaps it was because Roman numerals
>>> were big-endian.
>>
>> ... except that I thought "arabic" numerals originated in India,
>> and most Indian scripts are left to right.
>
> Yeah, but that's much more murky. There was all sorts of mathematics
> going on in India and Arabia during the Dark Ages - it was only dark
> in Europe.

Not that the Dark Ages were actually backwards, just that stuff
didn't tend to get written down. Take a look at the technology
involved in making, say, a Saxon sword (which used essentially the
same techniques as were developed centuries later in Japan to make
Samurai swords) or the quality of work in things like the Ardagh
Chalice.