Stones, pebbles?,  are introduced by the Greek as counting aids and will return in this form as a means to count similar to an Abacus (around 50 bc) in the Roman Empire. From there this Abacus spreads through Europe. In Western Europe these counting boards stay in use for a pretty long time but gradually one starts to use the indo-Arabic notation of numbers: "0123456789". (+/- 1200)

Muhammed idn Musa Al-Khwarizmi was born in 780 A.D. and died in 850 A.D. He was an Arabic mathematician who introduced the Hindu decimal system and the use of zero into Arabic mathematics. He also extended the work of Diophantis on algebraic equations in a book, the title which included the word al-jabr (transposition) from which the modern word algebra is derived.   (ref. Jennifer, 1996)