File:0121521 Chaturbhuj Temple, Gwalior Fort, Madhya Pradesh 37 (where is zero in this Hindu inscription).jpg

English: The Chaturbhuj Temple of Gwalior is a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu excavated in a rock face in the Gwalior Fort, Madhya Pradesh, India. The temple is famous for the earliest known inscription in the world that uses the symbol "0" to mean zero (see, Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer).

The inscription states, among other things, that the community planted a garden of 187 hastas by 270 hastas (1 hasta = 1.5 feet), that the garden yielded 50 garlands for the temple everyday. The last digits of 270 and 50 are "O" shaped. While Indian and non-Indian texts mention zero much earlier, this temple has the earliest known epigraphical evidence inscribed in stone that already knows and uses the concept of zero.

The above image shows exactly where to find the "2 7 0". The shape of the 9th century numerals is pretty close to the modern era form in Devanagari and many other Indic scripts (the "7" is written in several ways). For these numeral forms to be adopted in this inscription, the numeral shapes must have been mainstream by the 9th century.