Arabic (?) Numerals

My entire life, I have thought of our numeral system as Arabic Numerals - that is how I was taught.  Now, I find out that these numerals are Arabic in the sense that turkeys are "from turkey" - which is to say, not really.  I was skimming the book "The Babylonian Theorem"  by Peter Rudman from the local library (I tend to check out too many books to read and skim the nonfiction ones for fun - sloppy; I know, I know) when I read something along the lines of "when they invented the zero in India".  Huh?  I thought zeros were from the Arabic civilization.

Turns out the west found out about this cool system of numerals from the Arabs who got it from the Indians, but I was only taught one layer deep...  Check out these pics from Wikipedia:


(First Century AD Indian numerals)

I am immediately struck by the the first three characters being the same as in Chinese:

(chinese chart clipped from http://mathematics.gulfcoast.edu/leolusk/4_1.htm - see comments)

I've been pondering the roman numerals being for 1-2-3 being vertical strokes (I II III) whereas the chinese ones being horizontal for some time now, but what I didn't realize until today is that our western hindu-arabic 2 and 3 are formed by connecting the 2 or 3 horizontal lines from the ancient Indian script.

Here's another picture from Wikipedia showing a phone with modern Western and Easter Arabic numerals :

The French may think that their turkey are from India ("D'ind" - see link above on turkeys), but really their zero's are.  As a convoluted bonus we say "love" for zero in tennis because it sounds like "l'oeuf" (egg) in French.  Wonder what they say for zero in tennis in India...