Volume 1, 2013

EN:

This paper examines a number of crucial verses from the last chapter of Sphujidhvaja’s Yavanajātaka, a text that was widely believed to be the earliest Greek astral text translated into Sanskrit. In the light of some new materials, including a hitherto unreported Nepalese paper manuscript from the collection of the NepalGerman Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP), the date and nature of this important text are reconsidered.

EN:

Hypotheses of a Mesopotamian origin for the Vedic and Chinese star calendars are unfounded. The Yangshao culture burials discovered at Puyang in 1987 suggest that the beginnings of Chinese astronomy go back to the late fourth millennium BCE. The instructive similarities between the Chinese and Indian luni-solar calendrical astronomy and cosmology therefore with great likelihood result from convergent parallel development and not from diffusion.