Roman Empire using Hindu-Arabic Numerals? What else?

Was perusing through old threads and stumbled across this goldie: Roman India
Basic idea being that Romans had quite the presence on the west coast of India. Had that developed into some sort of trade/cultural-colony, how might things have developed with a Roman-ized state in Western India?

Rather than necro-ing the thread on the subject of the Romans adopting Arabic-Hindu numerals, I wanted to throw it out there and ask what other aspects of Hindu science might have made it back to the Roman Empire? Certainly nothing life-saving, but definitely enough to rock the boat significantly.
What would have made it's way back to Europe, and how would it have changed things?
 
I am under the impression that the Hindu positional numeral system with zero was invented in the sixth century AD, that is fairly late for it to be introduced to the Roman Empire (unless you mean the Eastern Roman Empire, but I don't know if they had any important direct commercial presence in India).
 
does this also include the use of zero?
As mentioned below, zero didn't come into use until the 500's.
I am under the impression that the Hindu positional numeral system with zero was invented in the sixth century AD, that is fairly late for it to be introduced to the Roman Empire (unless you mean the Eastern Roman Empire, but I don't know if they had any important direct commercial presence in India).
Still, the system of positional decimal numeral system is supposed to have been invented some time between the first and fourth centuries.

So using zero is probably out (unless the Romans independently come up with the concept independently once adopting the core system), but even without it, the advances in mathematics available through a positional numeral system would have been huge.

As to timing; let's say it makes its way back west sometime in the 2nd century CE? According to (at the very least) some reports, the Byzantines certainly were tied into India.

But in addition to numbers, is there anything else that would have been brought back?
 
Still, the system of positional decimal numeral system is supposed to have been invented some time between the first and fourth centuries.

So using zero is probably out (unless the Romans independently come up with the concept independently once adopting the core system), but even without it, the advances in mathematics available through a positional numeral system would have been huge.

Fair enough.

I don't know enough of India of the time.
I know they had a very impressive understanding of linguistics, including a very sophisticated philosophy of language and some seriously refined logic. I am afraid, however, that nothing of this is easily portable into the Late Roman intellectual space in way that makes a major impact (there's room to believe that some notions actually traveled IOTL, but the Indian and Graeco-Roman intellectual traditions were remained largely, although not entirely, autonomous AFAIK).
Indian epistemology also had some very deep thinking that could have been interesting to a more open Roman philosophy, but was somewhat difficult to translate effectively.
India also appears to have had some good medicine that could have been of use, although I can't tell of any specific practice.
 
Indian understanding of linguistics, phonology, and all related was based heavily upon Sanskrit and it's particular quirks. It may be able to to be translated into an explanation of the Latin language, or Greek, but there's some issues there.

Speaking of medicine and practices, I know little of developments after Kurukshetra's and if Mediterranean civilizations had already developed similar surgical practices.

One thing that would however reach Europe would be Buddhism, which already happened IOTL with Mauryan emissaries and missionaries who reached Greece.
 
Indian understanding of linguistics, phonology, and all related was based heavily upon Sanskrit and it's particular quirks. It may be able to to be translated into an explanation of the Latin language, or Greek, but there's some issues there.

Speaking of medicine and practices, I know little of developments after Kurukshetra's and if Mediterranean civilizations had already developed similar surgical practices.

One thing that would however reach Europe would be Buddhism, which already happened IOTL with Mauryan emissaries and missionaries who reached Greece.


Sanskrit is a pretty easy language to learn, if you can memorise a lot of words quickly. But by the time the Romans rolled in, Sanskrit was no longer the language of the masses. Only the priests and some of the nobles and mercantile class knew sanskrit enough to possible hold a conversation in it beyond, "hello! my name is..."

However since the grammatical structure of sanskrit and latin are very similar, translation should pose less of a problem.

As for medicine, you mean Charaka and Sushruta right? the famous indian physician and surgeon, respectively? They were both around before rome was anything more than a hamlet in Italia.

Finally Buddhism. I guess it was too alien to the Western culture to be widely accepted in the west in the absence of royal patronage.

hope this helps. Didn't mean to torpedo your arguments. Just was stating my thoughts.

As for the Indian numerals (why do people insist on calling it arabic anyways :p ) well i can't see how it will work without a zero. Can some one please explain how will they write '10' or a '100'?
 
Sanskrit is a pretty easy language to learn, if you can memorise a lot of words quickly. But by the time the Romans rolled in, Sanskrit was no longer the language of the masses. Only the priests and some of the nobles and mercantile class knew sanskrit enough to possible hold a conversation in it beyond, "hello! my name is..."

However since the grammatical structure of sanskrit and latin are very similar, translation should pose less of a problem.

As for medicine, you mean Charaka and Sushruta right? the famous indian physician and surgeon, respectively? They were both around before rome was anything more than a hamlet in Italia.

Finally Buddhism. I guess it was too alien to the Western culture to be widely accepted in the west in the absence of royal patronage.

hope this helps. Didn't mean to torpedo your arguments. Just was stating my thoughts.

As for the Indian numerals (why do people insist on calling it arabic anyways :p ) well i can't see how it will work without a zero. Can some one please explain how will they write '10' or a '100'?

I was referring to cultural translation, not linguistic. Translating stuff from Sanskrit to Latin should be relatively trivial. Getting Latin readers interested in what is translated (which is, of course, a requirement for the translation to be done) could be trickier.
I mean, the Paninian tradition has really deep, impressive understanding of how the Sanskrit language works. It can be translated into Latin (it happened IOTL in the Early Modern era) but why would an Aristotelian thinker in Rome about 250 AD even come to care about Sanskrit? They didn't seem to have thought that there is something interesting to be learnt by studying how languages function.
Indian thought had (and has) this very interesting notion of shabda, usually rendered as "knowing from words". That is, the idea that words are able to convey some useful knowledge is seen as epistemic problem worth discussing in Indian philosophy. It seems that it was never an issue in Classical Greaco-Roman philosophy. They were interested in the persuasive power of words, and they needed descriptive, didactic grammars of Greek and Latin, but they did not appear to have thought of language of something calling for inquiry (logic is another matter though). This means that a lot of Indian thought involving linguistic, logical and epistemological problems would likely appear utterly uninteresting to the average philosopher in the Roman Empire.
Now, I don't think it is impossible to change that. Perhaps some serious Indian mathematics is introduced, or, better yet, some Indian logic finds its way into narrative texts that are translated for entertainment/instruction (mirror of princes or the like) via Persia (where they appear to have circulated). Somebody in, say, Athens feels like it's worth to know more. If some thinkers on the Roman side spark a debate where Indian texts/concepts become relevant, they might to want to have more of it, generating a translation current.
Logic is the most likely beneficiary, together with maths and medicine.
I guess that in maths, you may get an earlier departure from the largely geometrical approach of the Classical arithmetics into a more abstract outlook into things like number theory. That could have a huge impact.
Algebra might have a big headstart.
 
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