Theophanes: Walīd seized the most holy cathedral of Damascus. The wretched man did this out of envy of the Christians, because this church was surpassingly beautiful. He also forbade that the registers of the public offices should be written in Greek; instead, they were to be expressed in Arabic, except for the numerals, because it is impossible in their language to write a unit or a pair or a group of three or a half or a third? (*) For this reason they have Christian notaries until this day.
(*) This is obscure, though the point may be that there was as yet no way of writing numerals in Arabic: Greek and Aramaic used individual letters to stand for numerals, but this was not done in Arabic and Indian numerals (what we call Arabic numerals) only began to be adopted in the early Abbasid period. There is also a story that when the Persian registers were being changed to Arabic. an objector to the process challenged the implementer as to how fractions could be written in Arabic (Sprengling. ʿFrom Persian to Arabicʾ, 195-96).
Theophilus Of Edessa’s Chronicle And The Circulation Of Historical Knowledge In Late Antiquity And Early Islam. Translated by Robert G. Hoyland.
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