Eastward Transmission of Hellenistic Astral Material

This site follows a line of transmission out of Mesopotamia and Alexandria and traces it westward: into Sasanian Persia, into Arabic, into Latin, and so into the European material the rest of the site is about. See The Zīj al-Sindhind for one leg of that route.

The same material also went east. It reached Tang Chang’an, through Indian and then Iranian intermediaries, in the eighth and ninth centuries, by way of the same Syriac and Middle Persian translations that fed the westward traffic. Tang China is therefore a terminus of this site’s declared subject, and stopping the map at Toledo leaves half of it blank.

This entry covers the contact history only: who carried what, in which direction, when, and on what evidence. It does not set out the technique of any of the texts it names, and it does not report what any of them held a configuration to mean. The reason is stated at the scope statement: the constraint is competence, since a treatment of technique would need a reader of classical Chinese, and the boundary makes no claim about who the material belongs to.

Indian material in Chinese Buddhist translation

Astral material of Indian origin was available in Chinese translation from the fourth to the seventh centuries without being widely taken up. Kotyk’s argument is that the change came in the eighth, when the arrival of Mantrayana Buddhism gave Chinese Buddhists a working reason to attend to astral matters, which in turn created a wider appetite for foreign astrology inside and outside Buddhist circles ^{1 pp. 22-24}.

The text usually placed at the head of that development is the Xiùyào jīng 宿曜經, the scripture of the lunar stations and the luminaries, translated by Amoghavajra 不空 (705-774). Its recension history is unusually well documented, and it shows who the intended users were. The translation was made in 759 and taken down by Shi Yao 史瑤, whose version was found hard to follow; a second version, revised and annotated, was produced in 764 by Yang Jingfeng 楊景風. Neither assistant appears to have been a monk ^{1 pp. 95-96}.

Yang Jingfeng was a calendar specialist who worked at court on calendar reform under the emperor Dezong around 783 ^{1 p. 96}. The document that introduced Indian astral material to a Chinese readership was therefore edited into usable shape by a member of the same professional world that computed the official calendar, treated at The Astronomical Bureau and the Calendar Case. The channels were not separate.

The shift to Iranian sources

Until the appointment of the astronomer Li Su, some time after 776, the bulk of astral material translated into Chinese came from Indian sources. Toward the end of the eighth century Iranian and Near Eastern sources were increasingly studied, with Persians apparently doing the early translation work and Sogdians taking an important part in the ninth century ^{1 pp. 120-24}.

Kotyk declines to sort the Persian from the Sogdian, on the ground that the Chinese terms for the regions shifted their referents over centuries and the origins of individual figures are often uncertain, and he therefore writes of Iranian astronomy and astrology in general ^{1 pp. 120-24}. This entry keeps that caution.

Li Su, whose name also appears as Luqa, became Director of Astronomy at the Tang court, succeeding the Indian astronomer Gautamasiddha ^{2 pp. 130-31}. The bureau that later put European Jesuits in charge under the Qing had been directed by an Indian and then by a Persian under the Tang. Continuity of institution across changes of personnel is the pattern here, and it holds in both directions.

Dorotheus in Chinese

A few decades after the Xiuyao jing, a work entitled Dūlì yùsī jīng 都利聿斯經 was translated into Chinese during the Zhenyuan period, 785 to 805. The title’s second element is generally taken to render the name of Dorotheus. The text is lost, and what survives are fragments and citations ^{1 p. 1242 p. 122}.

Mak’s study works from a related text preserved in a Ming anthology of astral treatises and compares it topic by topic against the surviving Greek treatises. His conclusion is that the Yusi jing renders a Greco-Persian astral text circulating in Central Asia before the seventh century; that the translation dates to the late eighth century and is connected with Li Su’s circle; and that the content aligns with the more practical Greek treatises, the Carmen Astrologicum of Dorotheus above all, rather than with the more philosophical Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy ^{2 pp. 130-31}. The topic-by-topic comparison itself is in his tables and is not reproduced here.

The routes are the site’s own subject. Dorotheus and Vettius Valens were translated into Middle Persian under the Sasanians and from Middle Persian into Arabic in the early Abbasid period; the Tetrabiblos went into Syriac in the mid seventh or early eighth century, then into Pahlavi, then into Arabic in 812 ^{2 pp. 105-08}. The eastward transmission was one branch of that same circulation ^{2 pp. 105-08}.

That is why the Dorothean material is the sharpest illustration available. The Greek original is lost in Greek. What survives passed through a Middle Persian intermediary into Arabic, which is the form modern readers use ³. One arm of that transmission produced the Arabic text a European translator now works from, and another produced a Chinese text of about the year 800 that is itself lost and known from quotation. See The Tetrabiblos for the other Greek treatise on the same journey, and Greek Loanwords in Sanskrit Astrology for the philological evidence of the Indian leg.