The Yavanajātaka and its Dating
The Yavanajātaka, “the horoscopy of the Greeks”, is a Sanskrit verse work that presents itself as a rendering of a foreign original. For most of the twentieth century it carried a precise and much repeated pair of dates. Those dates have not survived examination.
The received account
David Pingree’s edition of 1978 dated a Greek original to 149 or 150 CE and the Sanskrit versification to 269 or 270 CE, and identified two persons, Yavaneśvara as translator and Sphujidhvaja as versifier 1. The edition also reported what was widely described afterwards as the earliest attested use of a symbol for zero in India.
Those figures passed into general reference. They are attractive because they are specific, and because they appear to fix the moment at which horoscopic technique reached India.
Correction
Commonly saidThe Yavanajataka was translated in 149 or 150 CE and versified in 269 or 270 CE by two named men, and contains the earliest attested Indian zero.
The specificity was Pingree’s, not the manuscripts’. The numerals that yield 149/150 and 269/270 are not present in the manuscript readings; they are emendations printed in the edited text 2. The same is true of the zero: Mak, working from manuscript material not available to Pingree, found that the terms carrying it are, in his words, not only fictitious but superfluous: the passage neither contains them nor needs them 2.
The two-person reconstruction is also an interpretation. The tradition understood Yavaneśvara and Sphujidhvaja as one.
What replaced it
Harry Falk attacked the epoch verse on which the internal chronology depends, and in the course of doing so established the epoch of 21 March 22 CE 3 pp. 121-136. K. S. Shukla had already reviewed the final chapter and found the text and translation wanting. Mak edited that chapter afresh from the newly available material and set out the consequences for the dating 2.
The range that survives is wide: some time after 22 CE, and before the early seventh century. Precision is lost and accuracy gained. A text that can be placed within six centuries is a weaker peg for a transmission narrative than one placed within a decade, and several confident accounts of when Greek horoscopy reached India rest on the peg rather than on other evidence.
Contested
Pingree’s larger interpretation, that Indian horoscopic astrology is substantially of Greek derivation, is a separate question from the dating and is not settled by the correction. He was not a naive Hellenocentrist: he argued in print against measuring other traditions by Greek achievement 4. The philological evidence for contact does not depend on this text’s date at all, and is treated under Greek Loanwords in Sanskrit Astrology.
Gap in the evidence
This entry rests on English-language scholarship and does not consult the manuscripts. The Sanskrit horoscopic corpus is, for the most part, not critically edited, and this site does not present its technique or its interpretive doctrine; see the scope statement for why.
Shukla’s review is named in the text above and is absent from the source list. Its author and title are confirmed against a scan, and it is quoted at length by Mak, but its volume and page range could not be established from a primary record: the journal issue is not online in a form this entry could check, and the reference in Mak’s own bibliography uses oldstyle figures that machine text extraction drops. A secondary index gives volume 24, pages 211 to 223, which is probably right and is not good enough to print as a citation here.
References
- Bill M. Mak. The Date and Nature of Sphujidhvaja's Yavanajātaka Reconsidered in the Light of Some Newly Discovered Materials. History of Science in South Asia 1, 2013, 1-20. pp. 1-20. doi:10.18732/H2RP4T recordpeer reviewed
Open access. Shows that Pingree's dating of the Yavanajātaka rests on readings the manuscripts do not carry, and that the celebrated "earliest Indian zero" was Pingree's own conjectural insertion.
- David Pingree. The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja. Harvard Oriental Series 48: Harvard University Press, 1978, 2 vols.. find a copy (catalogue search) recordcontested
Still the only complete edition and translation, and now known to be unreliable in its edition, translation and dating. Not to be cited without Mak 2013 alongside it.
- Harry Falk. The Yuga of Sphujiddhvaja and the Era of the Kuṣâṇas. Silk Road Art and Archaeology 7, 2001, 121-136. pp. 121-136. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
Attacks the epoch verse underlying Pingree's dating. Source of the 21 March 22 CE epoch and, in passing, of the now-standard date of 127 CE for Kaniṣka I year 1.
- David Pingree. Jyotiḥśāstra: Astral and Mathematical Literature. A History of Indian Literature, Vol. VI, Fasc. 4: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981, v + 149 pp.. ISBN 9783447021654 recordscholarly
The bibliographic map of the field: which Sanskrit astral texts exist, in what state, and what has been edited.