*aka ‘nine’*
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*according to ‘georges ifrah’, the origin of the 9 integers can be attributed to the ancient indian civilization, and was adopted by subsequent civilizations in conjunction with the ‘0’*
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(in the beginning, various indians wrote 9 similar to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot)
The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a 3-look-alike.
The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the @ character encircles a lowercase a.
As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller.
Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle.
The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic.
While the shape of the 9 character has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in .
(this numeral resembles an inverted 6)
(to disambiguate the two on objects and documents that can be inverted, the 9 is often underlined, as is done for the 6)
(another distinction from the 6 is that it is sometimes handwritten with a straight stem, resembling a ‘raised lower-case letter q’)
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