A Greek book in Sanskrit verse, the gist

A Greek book in Sanskrit verse

One of the most quoted early books of Indian astrology survives in a single damaged bundle of palm leaves in Nepal, and the two dates everybody repeats for it came from a scholar's guesses at two broken words on the last leaf.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The book is called the Yavanajataka, the book of births of the Greeks. Its famous dates, 149 and 269 of the common era, rest on two damaged words. Better photographs of the same leaves, taken in 2011, show that neither word can be read the way it was read.

The Yavanajataka is treated in most accounts as one of the foundation stones of Indian astrology, and the whole of it survives as a single stack of dried palm leaves in the National Archives in Nepal. Each leaf is long and narrow like a ruler, with a hole punched through the middle where a cord held the stack together. The leaves are numbered. The first is missing, the last is snapped into pieces, and the ink has faded to brown.

The book teaches you to read the sky of the moment a person was born. It has clear Greek words inside it. Hora, from the Greek word for hour. Drekana, from dekanos. So a real Greek influence is in there. It also has a great deal that is not Greek at all: Indian gods, Indian medicine, a time cycle of a hundred and sixty-five years that no Greek source mentions.

An American scholar, David Pingree, published the book in 1978. He was not working from the leaves themselves. He was working from a poor microfilm of them. He said openly that the copy was full of mistakes, roughly one in every line, and that he was sometimes guessing.

Two of those guesses became famous. Sanskrit poetry cannot easily fit numbers into a line, so poets write numbers as words: a word meaning moon stands for one, because there is one moon. Pingree read two such word-numbers in the final verses and got two dates and two authors: a Greek text turned into Sanskrit in 149, and put into verse in 269.

In 2011 a second copy of the book turned up, misfiled in a microfilm catalogue, and colour photographs were made of the old leaves. Both dates fell apart. The words do not say what he thought. The scholar Bill Mak set this out in 2013.

What is left is a range. The book was written some time between the year 22 and the early 600s, and nobody can narrow it further from the evidence we have.

Words decoded

Yavanajataka (यवनजातक): the title of the book, meaning roughly "the Greeks' book of births"
yavana (यवन): originally a Greek, later a Sanskrit word for a westerner of any kind
birth chart: a diagram of where the sun, moon and planets stood at the moment and place someone was born
palm-leaf manuscript: a book written with a stylus on dried palm leaves, cut long and narrow, stacked and tied with a cord through a hole
microfilm: photographs of a document shrunk onto a strip of film, the standard way of copying manuscripts before digital cameras
edition: a printed version of an old handwritten text, put together by a scholar who decides what each unclear word says
colophon: the closing lines of a hand-copied book, where the author or the copyist sometimes names himself or gives a date
Shaka era: a way of counting years used across India for nearly two thousand years; add 78 to a Shaka year to get a year of the common era
number-words: the Sanskrit habit of writing a number as a word for something there is that many of, so "moon" means one and "eyes" means two
Sphujidhvaja and Yavanesvara: the two names in the book's closing verses, which Pingree took for two different men and which older Indian commentators seem to have taken for one

Why anyone should careAlmost everything anybody tells you about the age of Indian astrology comes from a chain: an old manuscript, a scholar reading it, a book quoting the scholar, a website quoting the book. This is one case where the whole chain can be laid out and checked, and the checking found that two confident dates were resting on two broken words. Knowing that is not a reason to think less of the tradition. It is a reason to ask, whenever a date is quoted at you, where exactly that number comes from.

Read it properly, 8 min A Greek book in Sanskrit verse