Finding Zero

by Amir D. Aczel

  Mr. Chamroeun Chhan, on the phone with the person at the desk, soon understood what I was looking for and who had sent me there, but he was away till late afternoon. He said that I should go directly to Angkor Conservation, as Hab Touch had suggested, and see what I could find there. If not, he would meet me at the museum at 5 p.m. I thanked the woman at the desk and went outside the museum and climbed back into Mr. Bee’s tuk-tuk.

  Mr. Bee made the drive pleasant—he was able to find the shortest route from the museum to the general area we were going to, east of Charles de Gaulle Boulevard in the vicinity of the pediatric hospital, on the road north from downtown. When we reached the hospital, he signaled me that he was stopping.

  “May I see the map again?” he asked. I gave it to him. “We turn here,” he said, “not by Sofitel as you did yesterday.” Sure of what he was doing, he took a barely paved road that ran just parallel to the one we had taken the day before. They were very close and looked the same, with the same street hawkers grazing the sides of each, and the same low bushes by the sides of the road and the same palm trees a little distance away. But the entrance to this road was hidden from the boulevard, and it took a keen eye to discern it.

  Mr. Bee signaled with his hand and carefully turned right. He drove slowly, looking searchingly to both sides. About half a mile later, he slowed down. On the left side there was an iron gate with a small sign: “Angkor Conservation.” He blew his horn lightly, and a man walked over and opened the gate just wide enough for a tuk-tuk to enter. We went in, driving over a series of stone slabs. A hundred feet inside were several large sheds and a group of men sitting outside one of them, making coffee in a copper pot on a little open wood fire. Mr. Bee approached them.

  There was a lot of talking in Khmer and gesturing, but the men didn’t understand what we wanted. Mr. Bee smiled sheepishly as he came back to me, and raised his hands up in the air as if to say, “I don’t get it.”

  “Ask them where the director is,” I said. There was more gesturing and words exchanged. Finally one of the workers pointed left. We walked in that direction. About 80 feet ahead of us was a makeshift office. I entered; Bee waited outside. “I am looking for the director,” I said to the woman at the desk. She ignored me. She clearly didn’t understand a word. It was very hot inside, the sun beating down on the tin roof even at this time of morning. I stood and waited. Finally, a middle-aged man came in. “Hello,” I said. “His Excellency Hab Touch of the Ministry of Culture sent me here. I am looking for inscription K-127.”

  “Hello,” he said. “Yes, he told us you would be coming. Let me take you to where all the old artifacts are, and you can look for it yourself, if it’s there at all. You know what happened right here in 1990 . . .”

  “Yes,” I said sadly. “The Khmer Rouge came and destroyed much of what you had here. But I hope . . .” He gave a wan smile and motioned me to follow him.

  We walked over to a large shed covered in plastic sheeting. “It might be here, somewhere, unless they got it when they plundered this place. You can see what they did.” He pointed toward the edge of the enclosure, where there was a pile of broken stones that once represented statues. It looked depressing and hopeless. Then he just turned around and went back to his office, leaving me among the rubble and the many standing artifacts.

  I looked around me, away from the piles of destroyed statues. There were probably thousands of items, including heads of statues from Angkor Wat—many hundreds of them, more than half of them badly damaged—and large stones with inscriptions filling much of the area. I began to walk slowly, from one item to the next, inspecting each. I knew vaguely what K-127 had to look like—if it still existed and was in one piece. It would have been a slab of red stone, about five feet high and broken at the top. I walked around for an hour, finding nothing. This was frustrating, and I was losing hope.

  Then I just sat down on one of the stone inscriptions, wiped my forehead—it was intensely hot and humid in this deserted, airless shed—and took a drink from my bottle of water. The temperature was surely over 100 degrees. I felt limp and lethargic. Then I forced myself to get up and started examining the stones again. I thought my random search would probably not be effective and decided to look more systematically, row by row. I went back to the entrance and took the first row, going down to the end, and then continuing to the next row, and so on. I searched in this way for another hour, but found nothing.

  Finally, I decided to walk behind the artifacts. I moved slowly from item to item until I came to a stone that fit the description I had with me. On its back side I saw an old piece of tape pasted to the bottom of the red stone. It read, “K-127.” I could not believe my eyes. Could this be right? Had I really found it?

  I looked at the front part of this large reddish stone, and there it was—I recognized the Khmer numerals: 605. The zero was a dot—the first known zero. Was this really it? I read it again. The inscription was remarkably clear. I stood by it feeling euphoric. I wanted to touch it, but dared not. It was a solid piece of carved stone, which had withstood the ravages of 13 centuries and was still as legible and clear and shiny of surface as ever. But I viewed it as fragile and delicate; I felt it was so precious that I dare not breathe on it. Perhaps this was a dream, and if I touched the stone, it would disappear. I’d worked so hard to find it. This is the Holy Grail of all of mathematics, I thought. And I found it.

  The moment of discovery of K-127, the seventh-century stele bearing the earliest known zero of our system.

  I really didn’t know what to do. I had no plans for how to proceed. I just stood there, amid hundreds of discarded, old, mostly broken sandstone heads from Angkor Wat, steles and pieces of carved stone, fragments of inscriptions of all kinds—and K-127. Its history flashed before my eyes. I imagined it being discovered in the nineteenth century among the ruins of Sambor on the Mekong, in the jungle by the mighty river. I saw it brought to the lab of George Cœdès; I imagined how elated the scholar must have been when he realized he had in front of him a zero carved on a stone in 683 CE, positive proof that would defeat any hypothesis that the zero was a European or an Arab invention. I imagined Cœdès frantically writing his article, making a pencil rubbing of the precious digits 6–0–5, and triumphantly delivering his coup de grâce to his bitter, prejudiced academic opponent. The very real red inscribed stone in front of me provided all that Cœdès needed. This was it—the deciding zero.

  The face of the stele K-127, showing the ancient writings, including the number 605.

  The numerals 605, the zero being the dot in the middle, from the photograph above.

  The upper part of artifact K-127, showing its broken top. The numerals 605 are on the second line from the bottom.

  The author with K-127, right after verifying the discovery.

  I imagined what happened later. The stele was discarded, placed in a desolate museum no one visited, moved to some unknown storage place among other abandoned objects, escaped destruction as Khmer Rouge thugs came rummaging through, smashing and burning and destroying anything of historical or artistic value. I saw it remain unnoticed and unharmed as destruction was perpetrated all around it; then it was moved once again, to come to an ignominious end in this shed in the middle of an empty field tucked in a jungle clearing. I closed my eyes and relaxed from the tension. Here it was, again. K-127. I looked very carefully at the ancient numerals.

  After four years of hard work, I had found the Cœdès inscription. It took so much detective work, writing, calling, pleading; so much help from the highest levels of the Cambodian government, including the director of cultural affairs in the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts; and the assistance of the Sloan Foundation, whose kind, intelligent administrators were willing to help a researcher recapture a piece of our lost history. I was euphoric. My quest was over. I would now photograph the inscription, go home, and write down all that had happened to bring me to thi
s moment of final triumph.

  Yes, I finally found this red stone with the first zero ever made—still the first known zero of our system, after all these decades, to the best of our knowledge. I remained standing quietly next to the inscription and took many photographs of it.

  And then I made my worst mistake.

  22

  There is a scene at the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s iconic film Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, goes through a harrowing set of experiences in a South American jungle, complete with skeletons on springs that come to life when a wire is tripped and shoot poison arrows at the intruder who dared penetrate their treasure’s hideaway. Then despite the dangers and odds against him, he finds his prize, a golden idol. But just as he comes out of this great adventure, there is his arch enemy, the Nazi-collaborating French archaeologist René Belloq, who with pointed guns takes away the prize, saying, “Once again, Dr. Jones, something that was briefly yours is now mine!” He laughs as he hauls away the priceless archaeological find.

  But Jones was smart and shrewd—he was just temporarily outmaneuvered by his foe. I, on the other hand, acted stupidly. Had I said nothing and just walked away, my story would end here. But, like the proverbial crow that couldn’t keep his mouth shut and lost the cheese to the wily fox, I opened my mouth. While Indiana Jones’s nemesis was a male French archaeologist, mine would turn out to be a female Italian archaeologist—a Sicilian from Palermo.

  While I was still gazing in awe and wonder at K-127, this remarkable inscription that was the culmination of a quest that had brought me halfway around the world, a pair of women researchers dressed in lab coats walked into this—rarely ever entered—shed in the middle of a field in this nearly deserted compound in the wilds of Cambodia. They were chatting loudly in Italian.

  Fond memories of my parents and my childhood sailings on the ship surfaced. Our ship often called at Italian ports, and I both speak well and love Italian. My father had studied navigation in Trieste, Italy, before becoming a captain, and my mother had taught herself Italian and was the president of the Haifa chapter of the Italian cultural society Dante Alighieri. I longed to speak it again, and in Asia I had little opportunity to do so. And the elation of having rediscovered K-127 made me more talkative than ever—I had a need, a desire to share my exciting discovery with other people.

  So I walked over to the two women and struck up a conversation; they seemed pleased to speak to someone who knew their own language. They introduced themselves as Lorella Pellegrino and Francesca Taormina. Taormina was blond and thin. Pellegrino was large, nearly six feet, with a round face framed with unruly, curly, and very dark hair.

  I proudly pointed to the red inscribed stone and said, “This is K-127—it bears the oldest known zero in history.” They looked at it casually, and both said, “Really?” Then Pellegrino said, “How wonderful! Thank you so much for informing us about this.” She turned to face it, and with a small stick she was carrying casually hit the top of the stone, where the writing had been broken off centuries ago. It made a loud thud. I almost fainted—how could she be so crude and careless, slamming a hard stick against such a precious object? She seemed oblivious to my instinctive recoil and said, “You see, Francesca and I just came inside here to pick up one stone object at random to restore—as practice for our archaeology students—so now we will pick this one, since you told us that it’s so important.”

  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. What have I done? I asked myself. These two Italians were grabbing my find—right in front of me—after so many years of my searching for it. Did they even fully understand its meaning to science history? They explained to me that they were both here by agreement between the Italian and Cambodian governments. Cambodia needed archaeologists to work on the vast ancient treasures found in this history-rich land, to learn to clean, catalog, and prepare artifacts for display in museums and exhibits. The two Sicilian archaeologists from the University of Palermo were training Cambodian students at a site near Angkor Conservation so that someday these students would become accomplished archaeologists and help preserve their nation’s heritage.

  Pellegrino and Taormina, just by chance, decided this day to come to the Angkor Conservation shed to select a random discarded artifact on which to practice archaeological “restoration” with their students. I tried to protest, saying that K-127 was an invaluable object of immense historical importance and that it should not be used as a guinea pig for students to make their mistakes with, spill paint on, or scratch the surface that had withstood the test of time, or perhaps drill into it or grind the facade. They ignored my protests.

  “So it’s a famous object,” Pellegrino said with a self-satisfied smile. “Good! I want the students to experience working with a valuable artifact, not just some old worthless stone. Thank you so much for pointing it out to us.” Before I could reply, the two women left the shed to make arrangements to move the heavy stone to their laboratory. I felt faint and powerless.

  What could I do? Pellegrino and Taormina were in Siem Reap at the invitation of the Cambodian government. None of the Cambodians would dare oppose their decisions—they were respected professors from a faraway land and had been brought to teach the Cambodians sophisticated technical skills. And I was a visitor, given limited permission to enter the compound to look for a particular item—who was I to interfere with their work? I didn’t own K-127—far from it. By intergovernmental agreement, these two Italian professors controlled the artifacts found in this entire area. They could do as they pleased, and they had decided that K-127 was to be used as a learning tool in their lab. They owed no one an explanation.

  I didn’t want this piece touched—and now they wanted to “restore” it? Restore what? It looked perfect as it was. The 1,330 years since it had been chiseled had left it remarkably free of signs of wear; a top segment had already broken off by the time it was found late in the nineteenth century, the part Pellegrino had just struck with her stick. Other than that, the stele was incredibly well preserved. Who would imagine restoring it? It seemed to me that Pellegrino and Taormina were teachers—they wanted to demonstrate to students how to restore artifacts. Whatever item they chose, they only restored it to teach their students this craft. But restoring such an artifact would only bring with it the risk of irreversible damage to an intact archaeological piece of evidence for a great human achievement.

  Pellegrino and Taormina came back into the shed, smiling. “It will be moved to our lab in a couple of weeks,” Taormina said with apparent satisfaction. And then Pellegrino turned toward me and said, “When you will come back to visit us, you will find the inscription beautiful and restored.” My God, I thought, who could ever save it from them now? I was angry and frustrated and tried to quickly think of a solution.

  K-127 belonged to the Cambodian people and deserved to be exhibited, as is, in a museum. I did not understand Pellegrino’s insistence on taking it into her lab—why would she need such an important artifact to teach restoration work? It made absolutely no sense to me. I began to suspect that she had another motive: Was she planning to try to pass it off as her own discovery, by publishing an academic paper, perhaps?

  And there was something else. It was an issue that archaeology has grappled with for a hundred years. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the great English archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered the palace of the legendary King Minos at Knossos on the north coast of Crete, the palace Homer described as containing the labyrinth in which the Minotaur—half bull, half man—was confined to roam. In 1628 BCE, a volcano eruption on the island of Santorini created a tsunami that destroyed the palace and the royal city, bringing to an abrupt end the entire Minoan civilization.1

  Evans did something innovative—and controversial. He “restored” the palace of Knossos. Where a statue of a lion once stood, perhaps, he placed a statue found elsewhere; noticing trace
s of red paint on it, he repainted it with modern red paint. Where he thought some canals had been built during the Minoan age, he reconstructed them. Where a roofed courtyard loomed over the coastline, he attached a new roof. A visit to the site of Knossos is, therefore, quite different from a visit to any other archaeological site in the world. What Evans did at Knossos had not been done before—at least not to the same extent—nor, perhaps, would ever be done again. Visiting Knossos today is seeing Evans’s view of what it might have been like—or not.

  As we strolled away from K-127, Pellegrino turned to me and said, “Ah, since you’re here, why don’t you come visit our lab? Soon we will place K-127 there and work on it.” My legs were shaking as we entered a small, air-conditioned building in which a handful of young Cambodian trainees were restoring fifteenth- and sixteenth-century (thus, post-Angkor) wooden Buddha statues. A middle-aged Italian professor with a trimmed gray beard supervised the work. Pellegrino brought me over to him.

  Professors Antonio Rava and Lorella Pellegrino in their lab near Siem Reap.

  “This is Professor Antonio Rava,” she said, introducing us to each other. Rava was from the University of Turin in northern Italy and had the typical accent of that region, which is close to French (he pronounced the r as a French person would, in contrast to the rolling way it is pronounced in most other parts of Italy). He spoke perfect English. “You see, there is very little interest in the post-Angkor era,” he said, “so we pretty much have it all to ourselves—nobody cares about these wooden Buddhas made after the fall of the Angkor empire in the fourteenth century. So we restore them, make them beautiful.” Sure, I thought, and now you’ll do whatever you please to one of the most important artifacts ever found in this country, whose authorities have given you carte blanche to do with antiquities as you desire. But I smiled politely and followed him.