Page:Smith - Number Stories of Long ago (1919).djvu/56

OF LONG AGO schools like ours to attend, and so he could neither read nor write, and he had little idea of Europe and none whatever of America.

Of all the people he knew, only the priests in the temple near his home could read and write, and no one in all Europe or Asia or Africa had ever heard of America — for this was many hundred years before Columbus was born.

The priests soon noticed that Gupta was brighter than the other boys in the village, and so they took him to the temple and taught him to read and write. They also taught him to write the numbers to four, which was as far as they themselves certain how to write them, but these numbers did not look at all like most of ours. The first three numerals were simply straight marks, like those the Romans used, and the four looked like our plus sign.

Gupta learned to write numbers with a sharp iron pencil which scratched slightly into a piece of palm leaf. Books were always 35