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“Hoernle's 1888 study of the Bakhshali manuscript (a birch-bark mathematical text discovered in 1881 near Peshawar) describes the dot serving two roles: as a placeholder for an unknown quantity (analogous to modern x) AND as a fundamental digit in the decimal place-value system — the zero. The manuscript was carbon-dated by Oxford's Bodleian Library in 2017 to between 224 and 383 CE, making it the earliest extant evidence of place-value zero in any tradition. ”