Where Jyotisha comes from

The books carry their own statements about where their ideas came from. Varahamihira, who worked in the sixth century by the catalogue record of the translation, cites earlier authorities in the Brihat Jataka. Iyer's notes name Parasara, Garga, Badarayana and Satyacharya among them, and one records Yavaneswara, the Greek lord, as a support of his on a point of doctrine. In the Brihat Samhita he writes that Greeks who have studied the science are respected like sages. That Varahamihira mentions an earlier Parasara does not show that the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra we can read, of unidentified edition, is that earlier work, and this page does not date it.

Iyer says all but two of the twelve alternate sign names in the Brihat Jataka, Kulira and Antyabha excepted, are evidently Greek terms, such as Kriya for Aries. He reads this as contact between learned men of India and Greece that went beyond the superficial, and he marks panaphara and apoklima, two classes of house, as Greek terms too. Thibaut's 1889 introduction to Varahamihira's Panchasiddhantika, which summarizes the Paulisa and Romaka Siddhantas, judges these two astronomical works dependent on Greek astronomy. Burgess in 1860 discussed a verse found in some Surya-Siddhanta manuscripts that sends its teacher to the city of Romaka. He wrote that it would be an indirect acknowledgment of Greek origin if it belonged to the text, and he judged it out of place where it stands.

The nakshatras tell a different story. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article by A. M. Clerke holds that everything points to a native origin for them, since some were named for Vedic gods and they underlie the sacrificial calendar. Clerke adds that the oldest series opened with Krittika, an arrangement correct about 2300 BC and hardly possible after 1800 BC. In her view the change to Ashvini as the first nakshatra came under Greek influence near the start of the Christian era, and that is one scholar's opinion from 1911.

Two popular phrases do not survive this check. The sources read here give the nakshatra system an old and native layer, but the horoscopic system of signs, houses and planets appears from Varahamihira's century with Greek words in it, and nothing read supports calling it purely Indian. Nothing read dates horoscopy to thousands of years ago either. Later research on how Greek ideas reached India was not read for this site.