Saturday, 26 December 2015

History of Indian Astrology in short

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_astrology

India

The earliest use of the term jyotiṣa is in the sense of a Vedanga, an auxiliary discipline of Vedic religion. The only work of this class to have survived is the Vedanga Jyotisha, which contains rules for tracking the motions of the sun and the moon in the context of a five-year intercalation cycle. The date of this work is uncertain, as its late style of language and composition, consistent with the last centuries BC, albeit pre-Mauryan, conflicts with some internal evidence of a much earlier date in the 2nd millennium BC.
The documented history of Jyotish in the subsequent newer sense of modern horoscopic astrology is associated with the interaction of Indian and Hellenistic cultures in the Indo-Greek period. Greek became a lingua franca of the Indus valley region following the military conquests of Alexander the Great and the Bactrian Greeks. The oldest surviving treatises, such as the Yavanajataka or the Brihat-Samhita, date to the early centuries AD. The oldest astrological treatise in Sanskrit is the Yavanajataka ("Sayings of the Greeks"), a versification by Sphujidhvaja in 269/270 AD of a now lost translation of a Greek treatise by Yavanesvara during the 2nd century AD under the patronage of the Western Satrap Saka king Rudradaman I.
Indian astronomy and astrology developed together. The earliest treatise on jyotish, the Bhrigu Samhita, dates from the Vedic era. The sage Bhrigu is one of the Saptarshi, the seven sages who assisted in the creation of the universe. Written on pages of tree bark, the Samhita (Compilation) is said to contain five million horoscopes comprising all who have lived in the past or will live in the future. The first named authors writing treatises on astronomy are from the 5th century AD, the date when the classical period of Indian astronomy can be said to begin. Besides the theories of Aryabhata in the Aryabhatiya and the lost Arya-siddhānta, there is the Pancha-Siddhāntika of Varahamihira.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedanga_Jyotisha

Vedanga Jyotisha

The Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, or Jyotiṣavedāṅga (Devanagari वेदाङ्ग ज्योतिष) is one of earliest known Indian texts on astronomy and astrology (Jyotisha).The extant text is dated to the final centuries BCE, but it may be based on a tradition reaching back to about 700-600 BCE.
The text is foundational to Jyotisha, one of the six Vedanga disciplines. It was composed by Lagadha

The Vedanga Jyotisha describes the winter solstice for the period of ca. 1400 BCE. This description has been used to date the Vedanga Jyotisha. According to Michael Witzel, the question is "whether the description as given in the jyotiSa is also the date of the text in which it is transmitted." T. K. S. Sastry and R. Kochhar suppose that the Vedanga Jyotisha was written in the period that it describes, and therefore propose an early date, between 1370 and 1150 BCE, while David Pingree  propose ca. 1180 BCE. The estimation of 1400-1200 BCE has been followed by others, with Subbarayappa adding that the extant form can be possibly from 700-600 BCE.


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