The History of Indian Literature c9.229.2

c9.229.2

the statement may be an exaggeration, but still it accords with the data which we have now to adduce, and which can only be explained upon the supposition of a very lively intellectual interchange. For the Indian astronomers regularly speak of the Yavanas as their teachers: but whether this also applies to Paráśara, who is reputed to be the oldest Indian astronomer, is still uncertain. To judge from the quotations, he computes by the lunar mansions, and would seem, accordingly, to stand upon an independent footing. But of Garga,cont who passes for the next oldest astronomer, an oft-quoted verse has come down to us, in which he extols the Yavanas on account of their astronomical knowledge. The epic tradition, again, gives as the earliest astronomer the Asura Maya, and asserts that to him the sun-god himself imparted the knowledge of the stars. I have already elsewhere (*I. St.*, ii. 243) expressed the conjecture that this ‘Asura Maya’ is identical with the ‘Ptolemaios’ of the Greeks; since this latter name, as we see from the inscriptions of Piyadasi, became in Indian ‘Turamaya,’ out of which the name ‘Asura Maya’ might very easily grow; and since, by the later tradition (that of the Jnána-bháskara, for instance) this Maya is distinctly assigned to Romaka-puracont in the West. Lastly, of the five Siddhántas named as the earliest astronomical systems, one—the Romaka-Siddhánta—is denoted, by its very name, as of Greek origin;