The story I have always heard is that, the arabic numeral system was developed by Persians not arabs, brought into the west through trade with the arab world, and is therefor known as "arabic numerals".
However, since I have heard so many different versions of why the numeral system is called what it's called. Some saying it was developes by Indians, some say a group of different people groups, and only perfected by Indians and Persians. Persians living in what now is modernday Pakistan, Indians living in what now is modernday Pakista etc.
Basically a whole lot of different facts, retelling, stories, and I just don't know what to believe anymore. So can I please just get this claryfied? Who developed the arabic numeral system, why is it called the arabic numeral system, and what are the missconceptions surrounding it?
(Sorry for any spelling or grammar mistakes)
It's called the "Hindu-Arabic" numeral system. It was invented in India and transmitted to Europe via Arabs and Persians.
The system isn't actually one thing, it's a set of developments dating to different periods, incrementally building to what we call Hindu-Arabic numerals.
It starts with the Vedas in the second millennium BC. Hindu cosmology consists of some pretty big numbers (in the billions), so the Vedas used a kind of shorthand using powers of 10 to represent them. This was the idea behind positional notation.
The next development was what we call a named place value system. Initially, this system didn't have an explicit zero. Instead, a zero was a blank, or sometimes represented by a dot (called shunya or bindu in Sanskrit).
We don't know exactly when this was invented, but it was probably in use around the time of Christ. The oldest written mention we have is from the Bakhshali manuscript, dating around 400 AD. This manuscript was found near Peshawar, which is probably where you got the Pakistan reference. However, the manuscript describes a system that had already been in use for a few hundred years at the time, so we don't know exactly which part of India it originated. We do know it was written by a brahmin named "son of chajaka".
The next and final development was a proper mathematical zero. This happened sometime during the Gupts dynasty. The oldest written mention is from the book Brahma Sphuta Siddhanta, by the astronomer Brahmagupta, in 628 AD. Brahmagupta was from Ujjain in east India.
So the Hindu-Arabic system we know today was the culmination of these 3 separate developments.
This system spread to the Arab world. The earliest Arsb mention is a report from the court of Caliph al-Mansur saying that an Indian astronomer visited and described a system of numerals that was extremely interesting. It says he slso brought a book (probably Brahmagupta's math manual), which was translated to Arabic.
Both Arabs and Persians very quickly adopted Hindu numerals. Between about 900 to 1200 AD, they wrote many mathematical texts, which eventually introduced the system to Europe.
Probably the most influential in transmitting to Europe was the Persian mathematician al Khwarizmi. He wrote a book tilled "On Calculation with Hindu Numerals" which was translated into Latin and then many European languages in the 13th and 14th centuries. That's how the system arrived in Europe.
The glyphs for the numbers themselves originate in the Brahmi script, which was used in India around the time of Ashoka. The glyphs have somewhat diverged since then in different scripts - devanagari in India, Arabic, Roman - but they are all derived from Brahmi.