Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.32

c9.32

20. The tables of Tirvalore, however, though they differ in form very much from those formerly described, agree with them perfectly in many of their elements. They suppose the same length of the year, the same mean motions, and the same inequalities of the sun and moon, and they are adapted nearly to the same meridian.²⁹ But a circumstance in which they seem to differ materially from the rest is, the antiquity of the epoch from which they take their date, the year 3102 before the Christian era. We must, therefore, enquire, whether this epoch is real or fictitious, that is, whether it has been determined by actual observation, or has been calculated from the modern epochs of the other tables. For it may naturally be supposed, that the Brahmins, having made observations in later times, or having borrowed from the astronomical knowledge of other nations, have imagined to themselves a fictitious epoch, coinciding with the celebrated era of the Calyougham, to which, through vanity or superstition, they have referred the places of the heavenly bodies, and have only calculated what they pretend that their ancestors observed.