Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.9

c9.9

6. The Brahmins, like all other astronomers, have distinguished from the rest of the heavens, that portion of them, through which the sun, moon and planets continually circulate. They divide this space, which we call the Zodiac, into twenty-seven equal parts, each marked by a group of stars, or a constellation.³ This division of the Zodiac is extremely natural in the infancy of astronomical observation; because the moon completes her circle among the fixed stars, nearly in twenty-seven days, and so makes an actual division of that circle into twenty-seven equal parts. The moon too, it must be remembered, was, at that time, the only instrument, if we may say so, by which the positions of the stars on each side of her path could be ascertained; and when her own irregularities were unknown, she was, by the rapidity of her motion eastward, well adapted for this purpose. It is also to the phases of the moon, that we are to ascribe the common division of time into weeks, or portions of seven days, which seems to have prevailed almost over the whole earth.⁴ The days of the week are dedicated by the Brahmins, as by us, to the seven planets, and what is truly singular, they are arranged precisely in the same order.