Identifying Vedic Asterisms - Software?

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 22:40:06 +0100, Arjun Ray wrote:

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?

I think I got what you are after. But the "unbroken tradition" is a
myth. Historically we have a so called dark period between the Vedic
period and the much later historical period with almost a thousand years
hiatus. Very little hard facts are known for that period let alone any
information about the scientific activity of the time. Moreover, the
oldest written versions of virtually all ancient Indian texts come only
from the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Thus some (or many) of the Vedic sutras
might have already been altered between the time of their original
composition and the time of the writing of the version that we have got
today.

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).

We of course don't know anything about the convention used for naming the
stars in the Vedic period. In later period all the Nakshatras were given
singular female names to conform with the mythology - they are all
daughters of Daksha & wives of the Moon.

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.

One possibility is to take a set of candidate stars and run the
planetarium program backwards to see if any of them matches up a specific
observation mentioned in the Vedic texts - such as a particular
conjunction with a planet or the moon - in the likely timeframe.

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!

We have to remember that many of the ancient texts are actually
compilations of the works of many people though they often go by the
name of a single author. This is often evident from the different writing
styles. Many such texts are not internally consistent. As for the specific
example of Shatapatha Brahmana, D P Chattopadhyaya in his book Science &
Technology in Ancient India, suggested that some of the observational
findings included were traditional, i.e., observed long time ago, possibly
even in the Indus Valley period, but not checked for the authenticity at
the time of compilation. Again, if the compilation was done over a long
period, i.e., later authors added their own observations to the text,
there will invariably be contradiction.

--

Gautam Majumdar

Please send e-mails to