History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.168

v6.c82.168

The chronology of the Vedic age is far from certain. Jacobi, Dikshit, Tilak and some others would put the Vedic age back to 4000 B. C. or even earlier. Winternitz puts it as far back as 2500 B. C., while Max Müller and following him many Western scholars would thrust all Vedic Literature between 1500 to 800 B. C. Even taking these latter timings the Vedic Literature shows a good deal of progress in astronomical matters which Indians could not have owed to Greece. There is no extant literature in Greece that can be placed earlier than about 900 or 800 B. C. with certainty. The Homeric poems and the works of Hesiod are the oldest surviving literary writings in Greek. Homer mentions the Sun, the Moon, the morning and evening star, the Pleiades, Hyades, Orion, Great Bear, Sirius (Orion's Dog), Bootes (Arcturus) and Hesiod mentions practically the same stars as Homer; Hesiod says that spring began sixty days after winter solstice, puts down moon's period at thirty days, but does not mention equinoxes.⁷³⁸ It should be noted that Vedic astronomy several centuries (if not thousands of years) earlier than Homer and Hesiod was at least as advanced as that in the two Greek authors. The very ancient peoples (besides Indians and Chinese) are the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Hittites and Chaldeans. About the Egyptians, the Cambridge Ancient History (vol. II p. 218) states that there is very little trace of the application of Mathematics to Astronomy in Egypt and that, though the length of the solar year had been fairly accurately determined, this was done by observation of the heliacal rising of Sirius or Sothis which happened to correspond rather closely with the first rise of the Nile and involved no calculation whatsoever. About Hittites and Chaldeans there is not much to be said as no one asserts that nakṣatras were borrowed from them. Even about 800 B. C. Homer's and Hesiod's knowledge of astronomy was meagre. Even Hipparchus, regarded as the greatest astronomer of antiquity who completed his catalogue about 130 B C., had access to a continuous series of observations made in Mesopotamia reaching back to 747 B C.738a. Ptolemy wrote about 150 A. D., his Almagest is based on the observations of Hipparchus, and almost all that is known about the predecessors of Ptolemy is derived from the latter's work, as, owing to the very excellence of Ptolemy's work, all writings of his predecessors ceased to be studied and have not been recovered. The theory of Greek influence in astrology will be dealt with a little later on, but a few words may be said here about the supposed influence of Greek astronomy on the Indian Siddhāntas⁷³⁹, and later works. In the