Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.13

c9.13

Another circumstance, which is common to all the tables, and, at the same time, peculiar to the Indian astronomy, is, that they express the longitude of the sun and moon, by their distance from the beginning of the moveable Zodiac, and not, as is usual with us, by their distance from the point of the vernal equinox. The longitude is reckoned in signs of 30°, as already mentioned, and each degree is subdivided into 60', etc. In the division of time, their arithmetic is purely sexagesimal: They divide the day into 60 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, etc.; so that their hour is 24 of our minutes, their minute 24 of our seconds, and so on.