Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.10

c6.10

But even the conceding of its mere antiquity was of very short duration. With the strengthening of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian tendencies, this concession began to look like blasphemy. Keeping in view the European historical premises, originating in the Old Testament, it was just not conceivable for anything except the stated items to have survived ‘the Deluge’ which was computed to have taken place in the year 2348 B.C. By 1814, though things Indian were still being half-heartedly defended by a journal like the *Edinburgh Review*, even the mere antiquity of Indian astronomy had received a final European dismissal.