From page 70 of Johan Norberg’s 2020 book, Open: The Story of Human Progress:
What we now think of as Western civilization is a combination of a philosophical heritage from the Greeks, religions from the Middle East, creatively interpreted by Romans in what is now Turkey, and scientific ideas borrowed from the Arabs and the Chinese. We got our alphabets from the Phoenicians, and our numbers are called ‘Arabic numerals’ because we learned them from mathematicians in Baghdad, who got them from the Indians.
Inertia Wins! 