Fw: Re: Date of Jyotisa Vedanga

[Koenraad Elst]

Oops, that last E-mail was this one without the contents.  So here goes.

 Van: Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan <Palaniappa at AOL.COM>
 dinsdag 21 maart 2000 21:16 wrote:
> > The CT text paripATal has some
interesting
> > astronomical information, even though the text is not an astronomical
> text.
> > In this century (20th), it has been translated into Sanskrit. Assuming
the
> > Tamil tradition is totally lost and replaced with Hindi/Sanskrit, won't
a
> > future researcher a la Elst and Kak looking at the Sanskrit translation
of
> > paripATal say that the text was produced 1500+ years earlier based on
the
> > astronomical information? (..)

Those who would say that the text was contentswise produced 1500 years
earlier, would obviously be right.  As for the translation from Dravidian to
Sanskrit, I've heard that so many times now that i wonder why no supporter
of that hypothesis ever gives compelling evidence from the ancient texts
themselves proving that they are really translations from Dravidian.  Why so
little Dravidian in religious and astronomical Sanskrit terminology?
Anyway, the theory that the IVC and its astronomy were Dravidian is now
being abandoned even by prominent opponents of any "Vedic Harappa" theory,
who have installed "para-Munda" and "language X" in its place.

Thank you Prof. Witzel for detailing some reasons why the Vedanga Jyotisha
most be "late-Epic" and at any rate post-Vedic.  That fits very neatly in an
over-all higher chronology which puts the Vedas themselves well before 1400
BC.

As for the 1st millennium AD Tamil texts mentioning Krttika as the beginning
of the lunar calendar: this is perfectly normal, as calendars once
established tend to be preserved for ages (that is precisely their whole
point: putting time on a permanent common denominator).  The Chinese system
of lunar asterisms started ca. 2400 BC with Krttika at the head, and
retained that system for thousands of years, even when Krttika was no longer
on the spring equinox.  But that is a very different matter from the VJ,
where the position of the solstices is given as such, not as a calendrical
relic.

K. Elst