While other cultures stopped at 'thousands,' Vedic texts name powers of ten far beyond.
The Yajurveda recites successive powers of ten with distinct names — eka, daśa, śata, sahasra … up to and beyond 10¹² — and later texts go vastly higher.
— Yajurveda — Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā 17.2 & Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.4.11; later Buddhist & Jain texts
The decimal place-value system and comfort with very large numbers — foundations of modern arithmetic.
A genuine, defensible parallel.
A small but telling fact: the Yajurveda lists names for successive powers of ten, marching from one, ten, hundred, thousand … all the way to a trillion (10¹²) and beyond. Most ancient number systems had no easy way to name or write such magnitudes; the very existence of these terms reflects an early, fluent decimal mindset. Later Indian, Buddhist and Jain texts pushed to almost unimaginable numbers, with named magnitudes far larger than anything needed for daily life.
This is straightforward history, not interpretation. It connects directly to India's foundational gifts to mathematics — decimal place-value notation and zero — which together made large-number arithmetic and, eventually, all of modern computation practical. The Ṛṣis' delight in naming the very large was the cultural soil from which those tools grew.