In , Gautam Majumdar
wrote:
| On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 07:53:16 +0100, Arjun Ray wrote:

| If you had bothered to read my post, I was interested in the *original*
| provenance of the names, not their use (or misuse) in latter days.

| Sorry if I offended you by mentioning astrology. But part of your post
| did suggest to me that you are after some astrological info.

It looks like my English must be even worse than that, if I'm failing to
convey the basic point that using *later* texts - many, if not most,
indeed astrologically oriented - to fix the meanings of *earlier* names
is anachronistic thinking:

Text 1, dated to (say) 1000 BCE, mentions Name X.
Text 2, dated (say) 100 CE, says Name X means Star Such-and-such.
Ergo, Name X in Text 1 is Star Such-and-such.

No matter how much people may babble about "unbroken tradition" or
whatnot, this kind of retroactive attributiun is fallacious. Another
way to express this is to say that an "unbroken tradition" needs to be
demonstrated rather than presumed. Do you see that?

| Anyway, a quick google search revealed a number of interesting sites. I
| suggest you look at
|
| http://www.geocities.com/vijayabalak...akshathra.html

I found that - and a number of similar pages - a while back. It's an
absolutely classic example of the kind of anachronistic reasoning that
I'm trying to find a way around!

All these so called analyses *start* with identifying kRttikA as the
Pleiades (or just Alcyone).

Now, this is in fact true of the *later* tradition. But it is by no
means clear that the kRttikA of Vedic times - such as Taitiriya Samhita
IV.4.10 or Taittiriya Brahmana 3.1.1.1 or AtharvaVeda XIX.7 - is also
the Pleiades.

And the say-so of a later tradition doesn't make it so anyway. Or, so
one could hope.

| This site gives details of all 27 Nakshatras with their Arabic/Latin
| names where available, SAO & HD catalogue numbers, brightness, etc.
| From that it should be easy to find them on any planetarium program.

I was looking for a planetarium program that would help me examine
sections of the ecliptic band for candidate asterisms that could be
matched to the Vedic names on internal evidence alone - such as the
hints provided by differences in grammatical number and the use of
"purva" and "uttara" as prefixes for three pairs of names.

Note that the later tradition has all names in the singular - which, not
at all surprisingly, the Balakrishna article you referenced above takes
as a "given" even for the Vedic names! But, for example, what is called
the Ashwini (singular) asterism today - as part of a socalled "unbroken
tradition", we are told - was in fact originally Ashwiyujau (dual).

The point would be to determine several candidate sets as part of a
"clean room analysis" and only *then* see if they can be winnowed down
to a single set, and only *then* determine if the later tradition is
consistent with the evidence from earlier times.

Note that working backwards instead has led to a number of utterly
fantastic claims. For example, it has been argued that kRttikA is first
on the list because it was associated with the vernal equinox (i.e. a
"first point of Aries"). This hasn't been true of the Pleiades since
some time in the second millemnium BCE. Only crackpots would claim that
the Shatapatha Brahmana, a work that shows knowledge of iron, goes back
that far, but believe it or not, this kind of nonsense is actually being
put forward in "Balakrishna, Ph.D." style as serious science!