There was an Arabic scholar who thought that the Hindu way of recording numbers was clever and useful. He put his thought into a little book which found its way into Europe about 1,000 years ago. We know about this because European writing has been found, using these same signs, in a hand-written paper dated 976 CE. The symbols were called Arabic Numerals because the book came from Arabia. We have records to show that these curved Arabic Numerals were copied by hand for many years. However, merchants continued to use Roman Numerals, probably because they were easier to write since they were all straight lines.