Tradition · The gist
Varahamihira, and a century that can be pinned down
Almost every famous old Indian book about the sky has an author nobody can date, and Varahamihira is the one exception, because he wrote three lines about himself at the end of a book, so it is worth knowing which of them hold up.
This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.
Most of the old Sanskrit books on the sky carry a name and nothing else. No place, no century, no father, no student. The name is a label for a school of teaching rather than a person you could point at.
Varahamihira is the exception, and only because of a few lines at the end of one of his books: his father, who was also his teacher; a place called Kapitthaka where he received the favour of the Sun; and his home region, Avanti, around the city of Ujjain.
The essay tests those lines one at a time. Avanti holds up. His astronomy book corrects for the difference in longitude between Ujjain and Alexandria, which is exactly the adjustment somebody sitting at Ujjain would need before he could use tables drawn up for Egypt. Kapitthaka holds up much less well: the manuscripts spell it several ways, and scholars have placed it at two sites several hundred miles apart.
Then the famous date, which he was not writing down for our benefit. Any manual that works out where the planets are has to start counting days from a fixed moment. This one names its moment: sunset at a place the text calls Yavanapura, taken by its editors to be Alexandria in Egypt, in year 427 of the Shaka era. That era counts from 78 CE, so the year is 505. Astronomers pick a recent starting moment on purpose, because the further back you start, the more time small errors have to pile up. So the book was very probably written soon after 505, and certainly not before.
The rest comes from other people's desks. In 628 the astronomer Brahmagupta argued against parts of Varahamihira's work, and nobody argues with a book that has not been written, so there was a working author somewhere between 505 and 628. A commentator writing around 1200 records that he died in 587, six hundred years after the event.
Words decoded
- Varahamihira
- an Indian astronomer and astrologer who was at work in the 500s CE
- colophon
- the short note at the end of a hand-copied book saying who wrote or copied it, and sometimes where and when
- epoch
- the fixed starting moment that a book of calculations counts forward from, like the zero on a ruler
- Shaka era
- a way of numbering years used across India for nearly two thousand years, counting from 78 CE, so Shaka 427 is 505 CE
- longitude
- how far east or west a place lies, which decides how far ahead or behind its sky and its clock run compared with another place
- commentary
- a later scholar's line-by-line explanation of an older book, often the only place a lost fact survives
- Panchasiddhantika (पञ्चसिद्धान्तिका)
- Varahamihira's astronomy book, which compares five systems of calculation that were in use in his time
- Brihat Jataka (बृहज्जातक) and Brihat Samhita (बृहत्संहिता)
- his other two big books, one a compact handbook on birth charts, one an encyclopedia of about a hundred chapters
- forgery
- here, a book written much later than it claims, under a famous author's name
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