History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c82.757.3

v6.c82.757.3

The cumulative effect of all the evidence adduced above is to render it extremely probable, if not certain, that the worship of the planets and knowledge of the weekdays presided over by them was known to the Indians at least between 100 B. C. to 100 A. D. One further circumstance is that the names of weekdays in India are purely Sanskrit and there is hardly any reference to a weekday in Sanskrit works under any Greek or other non-Indian name, while in the case of the signs of the zodiac frequent use is made of such foreign words as *kriyā* or *leya*. Fotheringham (in explanations in Nautical Almanac for 1935 at p. 769) states that the mean temporal hour with the length that it had at equinoxes is first found in Hipparchus (140 B. C.), that Ptolemy in the Tables in the Almagest reckoned the day from mean noon of Alexandria and divided the day into sixty equal parts each of which was divided sexagesimally and that Ptolemy in his manual Tables divides the whole day into equinoctial hours reckoned from noon in Alexandria and subdivided these sexagesimally. This shows that two systems of dividing the day into 60 parts and also into 24 parts were accepted by Ptolemy himself (who wrote only about 150 A D ). Therefore, Indians could very well have used very early the 60 divisions system for finding out the order of the weekdays instead of 24 divisions system. The Indians did not calculate their day from noon or night but from the morning.