Alphasyllabic numeral system

Starting around 500 AD, Indian astronomers and astrologers began to use this new principle for numeration with assigning numeral values to the phonetic signs of various Indian alphasyllabic scripts – the brahmi scripts.

[2] Earlier 20th-century scholars supposed that the Indian grammarian Pāṇini used alphasyllabic numerals already in the 7th century BC.

[3] Since there is no direct evidence for any alphasyllabic numeration in India until about 510 AD, recently this theory is not supported.

This made possible the construction of various mnemonics to aid scholars and students, and would have served a prosodic function.

Structure of the Indian alphasyllabic numeration systems differs basically from one another.

Āryabhaṭa numeration table (varga consonants, and avarga consonants are ordered to 1-25, and 30 -100; vowels to the powers of 100)