A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy From the Earliest Dawn of That Science in India to the Present Time

About this book

A reprint of a classical work in the Cambridge Library Collection.

Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-seven princesses, a war between gods and giants, and shadows that give birth to planets. In this A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, first published in Calcutta in 1823 and reissued here in the 1825 edition, John Bentley (c.1750-1824) strives to strip back the mythical aspects of the stories to reveal their foundations.

He points out that early Hindu astronomers divided the night sky into twenty-seven sections; that a solar eclipse could have been described as an epic war between light and dark; and that Saturn is often observed in the Earth's shadow. Using data from modern astronomical tables, he dates events, texts and people, whether mythical or factual, as well as charting the history of Indian astronomy from its earliest records to its modern developments.

Contents

Preface

Part I:
1. The early part of the Hindu astronomy involved in great obscurity
2. Rama
3. The war between the gods and the giants in the west
4. Commencement of the third astronomical period
5. Commencement of the fifth astronomical period

Part II:
1. Commencement of the eighth astronomical period
2. System of Varaha
3. The Arya Siddhanta
4. Vahara Mihira, like Aryabhatta, endeavours to support the new order of things
5. The cause of Varaha Mihira being thrown back into antiquity by the moderns explained
6. Self-defence the object of this section

Appendix.

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