History of Science in South Asia (Journal)
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Gameplay as Foreplay at a Medieval Indian Court: Translation and Discussion of Mānasollāsa 5.16, Phañjikākrīḍā
No full textThis study focuses on the singular courtly game of phañjikā described in the 12th-century Mānasollāsa attributed to King Someśvara III of the Western Cālukya Empire. It shows that phañjikā belongs to the family of cruciform race games, which also counts the famous games of caupaṛ and paccīsī among its members. Phañjikā, however, predates the earliest evidence for both of those games by several centuries, and should therefore be considered an early indication of the popularity that cruciform race games would come to enjoy in elite and royal households from at least the 15th century onward. The study also shows that phañjikā did not enjoy the same status at court as other board games, such as chess and backgammon, also described in the Mānasollāsa. It was primarily associated with the women at court, and only engaged in by the king for the pleasure of witnessing the passionate emotion that it stirred in them. Based on the low status of the game, and the prevalence of race games in all levels of society, the study argues that phañjikā was likely an elaborate courtly adaptation of a simpler folk game. This would explain its absence from the literature outside the Mānasollāsa, as well as its many correspondences with a wide range of cruciform, square, and single-track race games only documented in more recent sources. The study suggests that more scholarly attention should be paid to the regional literatures of India, as they developed in the first half of the 2nd millennium CE, for a more detailed understanding of the early history of medieval Indian race games to be arrived at
The Borrowings Kṣuta-/kṣut- (“Inimical”) and Vidumāla- (“Retrograde”) in Sanskrit Astrological Texts, and the Representation of Semiticʿayn in Similar Loans
No full textThis short article deals with the etymologies of two Perso-Arabic loans that function as technical terms in Tājika (Indian astrology imported from the Perso-Arabic cultural area), both appearing in the works of the 13th century CE astrological author Samarasiṃha. The terms are kṣuta-/kṣut- (“Inimical”) and vidumāla- (“Retrograde”) - the meanings of both have been clear for some time, but the article elucidates their exact etymologies, and uses them to argue a rather complex mode of scientific/scholarly transmission, possibly involving as many as four languages: Arabic, Persian, Old Gujarati (or other northern Indo-Aryan vernaculars of the time), and finally Sanskrit. Finally, the article discusses the renderings of the voiced pharyngeal fricative in loans of this type in the light of early Modern Persian orthography and phonology
Three Versions of Crow Omens
No full textThis paper examines three versions of crow omens composed in Sanskrit verses of anuṣṭubh metre from two different sources, one Brahmanic, Gārgīyajyotiṣa, and the other Buddhist, Śārdūlakarṇāvadana. Their similarities in language and content leave little doubt that they had a common source that was probably located in the northwest of the Indian sub-continent sometime around the beginning of the Common Era. 
The Evidence for Hospitals in Early India
No full textThe article surveys the history of South Asian literature and epigraphy for reliable evidence regarding the existence of early hospitals. It explores the reasons that may account for the exclusion of South Asian data from international scholarship on the history of hospitals. The widely-repeated idea that King Aśoka built hospitals is refuted. Nevertheless, hospitals may be very early in India. It is suggested that scholarly medical literature on the building and equipping of a hospital was transmitted to Baghdad in the late eighth century and influenced the construction of early Islamic hospital
Sanskrit Recension of Persian Astronomy: The computation of true declination in Nityānanda\u27s Sarvasiddhāntarāja
No full textIn the history of exchanges between Islamicate and Sanskrit astral sciences, Nityānanda\u27s Siddhāntasindhu (c. early 1630s), composed at the court of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1628─58), is among the earliest examples of a Persian astronomical text translated into Sanskrit. In an earlier study, Misra (2021) described the sociohistorical context in which Nityānanda translated Mullā Farīd\u27s Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī (c. 1629/30) into Sanskrit, and among other things, provided parallel comparative editions, with English translations, of the Persian and Sanskrit text describing the computation of true declination of a celestial object.
While Misra\u27s paper focused on the linguistic aspects of the translation process, the present paper studies the mathematics of the three methods of computing the true declination vis-à-vis Nityānanda\u27s recension of his Sanskrit translations from his germinal Siddhāntasindhu to his chef d\u27œuvre, the Sarvasiddhāntarāja (1638). The paper begins by discussing the transformation of the Sanskrit text from the Siddhāntasindhu Part II.6 to the spaṣṭakrāntyadhikāra \u27topic of true declination\u27 in the gaṇitādhyāya \u27chapter on computations\u27 (henceforth identified as I.spa·krā) of his Sarvasiddhāntarāja. The metrical verses of Sarvasiddhāntarāja I.spa·krā are edited and translated into English for the very first time. A large part of this paper focuses on the technical (mathematical) analysis of the three methods of true declination, and includes detailed explanatory and historical notes. The paper also includes several technical appendices and an indexed glossary of technical terms
Geometrical Knowledge in Early Sri Lanka
No full textThis article addresses on history of mathematics (specially one of its specific branch, geometry) in Sri Lanka. Despite the large amount of research on the history of mathematics in India, China and the Middle East, that on Sri Lanka still remains limited. Sri Lanka had close relations with all these regions from ancient times and knowledge of mathematics should not be an alien subject there. This article tries to address the paucity of research on the history of mathematics in Sri Lanka while emphasizing the local character of that ancient knowledge.
The Seasons in Ancient Indian Medicine: Long Winters or Extensive Rains?
No full textMost passages on the seasons in works of ancient Indian medicine list frost, spring, summer, rainy season, autumn and winter as the divisions of the year. However, in some contexts, the hibernal season frost (śiśira) is left out and replaced by a second rainy season, called “beginning of the rain” (prāvṛṣ), that is placed between summer and the actual rainy season. In this paper, I first introduce the concept of the seasons and the division of the year into two halves. Second, I examine the dichotomy of the existence, within one scientific corpus, of two seasonal schemes that vary regarding the included seasons. Concerning this matter, I review the investigations of Francis Zimmermann and compare them with Ḍalhaṇas commentary on the relevant passages in the Suśrutasaṃhitā. This analysis shows that Zimmermann was by and large correct when he argued that the two schemes are utilized in specific contexts but it proposes a new terminology for the schemes, understanding them as preventive and reactive instead of distributive and transitive. Finally, an examination of the relevant passages in the lesson on the seasons in the Suśrutasaṃhitā reveals that, contrary to the correspondent lessons in the other sources, here the two schemes are mixed together in a very confusing way. This, in combination with further textual evidence, clearly points to the posteriority of the Suśrutasaṃhitā’s lesson on the seasons compared to its counterparts in the Caraka- and Bhelasaṃhitā
A Note on the Indian Planetary Exaltations and their Greek-Language Sources
No full textA close examination of the lists of planetary exaltations given by two of the earliest known Sanskrit authors on horoscopic astrology – Mīnarāja and Sphujidhvaja – solves the confusion surrounding Mīnarāja’s idiosyncratic assignment of degrees and suggests that both authors, and indeed all later Indian astrological literature, depended for this doctrine on a single, Greek-language source
Persian Astronomy in Sanskrit: A Comparative Study of Mullā Farīd’s Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī and its Sanskrit Translation in Nityānanda’s Siddhāntasindhu
No full textStarting from the late medieval period of Indian history, Islamicate and Sanskrit astral sciences exchanged ideas in complex discourses shaped by the power struggles of language, culture, and identity. The practice of translation played a vital role in transporting science across the physical and mental realms of an ever-changing society. The present study begins by looking at the culture of translating astronomy in late-medieval and early-modern India. This provides the historical context to then examine the language with which Nityānanda, a seventeenth-century Hindu astronomer at the Mughal court of Emperor Shāh Jahān, translated into Sanskrit the Persian astronomical text of his Muslim colleague Mullā Farīd. Nityānanda\u27s work is an example of how secular innovation and sacred tradition expressed themselves in Sanskrit astral sciences.
This article includes a comparative description of the contents in the second discourse of Mullā Farīd\u27s Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī (c. 1629/30) and the second part of Nityānanda\u27s Siddhāntasindhu (c. early 1630s), along with a critical examination of the sixth chapter from both these works. The chapter-titles and the contents of the sixth chapter in Persian and Sanskrit are edited and translated into English for the very first time. The focus of this study is to highlight the linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and communicative) aspects in Nityānanda\u27s Sanskrit translation of Mullā Farīd\u27s Persian text. The mathematics of the chapter is discussed in a forthcoming publication. An indexed glossary of technical terms from the edited Persian and Sanskrit text is appended at the end of the work
Doṣas by the Numbers: Buddhist Contributions to the Origins of the Tridoṣa-theory in Early Indian Medical Literature with Comparisons to Early Greek Theories of the Humours
No full textThis paper explores the origins of the Indian medical nosology involving the three doṣas from the perspective of its formulation into three or four distinct types. The essay compares similarities in passages from three different literary sources: Pāļi texts of early Buddhism, early Sanskrit medical literature, and Greek texts from the Hippocratic Corpus and the Anonymus Londiniensis. The study reveals that the tridoṣa-theory, common to āyurvedic literature from an early time was based on the adoption and then adaption of ideas nourished by an intellectual exchange with the Greek-speaking world