Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/437

 motives as much as the science of grammar. The prose parts of the Yajurvedas and the Brāhmaṇas constantly speak of the arrangement of the sacrificial ground and the construction of altars according to very strict rules, the slightest deviation from which might cause the greatest disaster. It is not likely that the exclusive Brahmans should have been willing to borrow anything closely connected with their religion from foreigners.

Of Astronomy the ancient Indians had but slight independent knowledge. It is probable that they derived their early acquaintance with the twenty-eight divisions of the moon's orbit from the Chaldeans through their commercial relations with the Phœnicians. Indian astronomy did not really begin to flourish till it was affected by that of Greece; it is indeed the one science in which undoubtedly strong Greek influence can be proved. The debt which the native astronomers always acknowledge they owe to the Yavanas is sufficiently obvious from the numerous Greek terms in Indian astronomical writings. Thus, in Varāha Mihira's Horā-çāstra the signs of the zodiac are enumerated either by Sanskrit names translated from the Greek or by the original Greek names, as Āra for Ares, Heli for Hēlios, Jyau for Zeus. Many technical terms were directly borrowed from Greek works, as kendra for kentron, jāmitra for diametron. Some of the very names of the oldest astronomical treatises of the Indians indicate their Western origin. Thus the Romaka-siddhānta means the "Roman manual." The title of Varāha Mihira's Horā-çāstra contains the Greek word hōrā.

In a few respects, however, the Indians independently advanced astronomical science further than the Greeks themselves, and at a later period they in their turn