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Venus transits at Pondicherry (1)

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05 Scientific knowledge and scholarly lore



Keywords
astronomy
Greece
India
Period
Hellenistic Empires
Roman Empire
Channel
Papyri from Egypt


Text
The dependence of Indian astronomy on the Hellenistic and ultimately on Babylonian prototypes has long been recognized. In this process of transmission the interpretation of two Greek papyri concerning with the motion of the moon is important: P.Lund Inv. 35a from the time of Nero-Domitian (64-80 CE) and P.Ryl. 27 written around 250 CE. The methods displayed in these papyri are based on Babylonian parameters and procedures. Their exact counterparts had been found some centuries ago by Guillaume LeGentil (1725-1772) in South India where he attempted to observe the Venus transits of 1761 and 1769 from the French colony at Pondicherry. He missed the transits (first because of war and then because of clouds), but he succeeded in getting native Tamil scholars to compute for him the circumstances of a lunar eclipse using rules which were identical with the methods in the above-mentioned papyri. It is certainly no accident that a site near Pondicherry, Arikamedu, was a center of Roman trade in the early imperial period. No doubt the interest in astrology, a discipline brought to its highest development in Hellenistic Egypt, was the vehicle that transmitted also the strictly astronomical techniques to India.


Sources (list of abbreviations)
P.Lund Inv. 35a
P.Ryl. 27

Bibliography

Neugebauer 1972, 250Neugebauer, Otto. “On Some Aspects of Early Greek Astronomy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972) 243-251. [JSTOR (requires subscription)]

Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
Guillaume LeGentil

Amar Annus


URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0001098.php


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