History of Science in South Asia A Note on the Indian Planetary Exaltations and their Greek-Language Sources

The highly popular Praśnatantra attributed to Nīlakaṇṭha of Kāśī (fl. late 16th century) and sometimes regarded as the third volume of his Tājikanīlakaṇṭhī is shown to depend for its basic structure on an abridged Sanskrit version of the Kitāb fi l-masāʾil wa-l-aḥkām by Sahl ibn Bishr (early 9th century), apparently authored by Samarasiṃha in the 13th century, to which quotations primarily from Sanskrit astrological works in the classical Indian style have been added, resulting in a hybrid of Indian and Perso-Arabic interrogational astrology.


A Note on the Indian Planetary Exaltations and their
Greek-Language Sources

Martin Gansten
Lund University

I N T RO D U C T I O N I N THE COMMENTARY OF HIS CRITICAL EDITION AND TRANSLATION of Sphujidhvaja's
Yavanajātaka, David Pingree notes that the degrees of the exaltations (ucca) of the planets -that is, the regions of the zodiac in which they are considered uniquely powerful -as given in that text largely correspond to the standard scheme found in Greek-language astrological works. 1 The two exceptions concern the exaltation degrees of the sun and Jupiter in Aries and Cancer, respectively: The two deviations in the Yavanajātaka, then, are Aries 10 ∘ for 19 ∘ and Cancer 5 ∘ for 15 ∘ . It is possible that these represent purely scribal errors, a ′ being omitted from an ′ and an ′ for an ′ in the manuscript translated by Yavaneśvara. 1 Pingree (1978: II, 220  Although Pingree's assumption that Sphujidhvaja's is the earliest preserved Sanskrit work on horo scopic astrology and must therefore be the original source of the Indian exaltation degrees has now been called into question by Bill Mak and others, 3 it is substantially correct to say that Indian astrological tradition agrees with the scheme given by Sphujidhvaja. Pingree's reconstruction of the likely mechanisms behind the two Indian deviations -the Greek alpha-numeric ιθ (19) becoming ι (10) and ιε (15) becoming ε (5) -is likewise com pelling, irrespective of who was responsible for the original mis reading. However, Pingree's reference to the 'completely confused' version of the exaltations found in Mīnarāja's Vṛddhayavanajātaka, and its presumed dependence on Sphujidhvaja, merits closer examina tion.

Planet
Greek standard Sanskrit standard Mīnarāja At that time, however, I had not fully con sidered its implications for the early transmission history of the doctrine of exaltations. It thus seems worth while to examine it here in greater detail, and to draw out those implications. Mīnarāja gives the following account of the planetary exaltations: The exaltation of the sun is the first ten degrees; of the moon, the twenty-seventh Comparing this with the standard scheme found in other Sanskrit works, three important points may be noted. First, no sign of exaltation is explicitly mentioned for the sun, although 'the first ten degrees', if taken to refer to the zodiac as a whole, would fall in Aries; second, the degrees of exaltation for the remaining six planets all differ from the standard scheme; and third, Mīnarāja's account ends with an odd mention of the twentieth degree, not assigned to any particular planet.
If we compare the models as shown in the table above, a partial explanation suggests itself almost immediately: following the 10 degrees given for the sun, a superfluous figure 27 has some how intruded, leading all subsequent numbers to be displaced. Thus, the 3 degrees for the moon's exaltation in Taurus have been assigned instead to Mars' exaltation in Capricorn; the 28 degrees properly belonging to Mars in Capricorn have been assigned to Mercury in Virgo, and so on. This chain eventually leads to the figure of 20 degrees (originally belonging to Saturn in Libra) being left unassigned. However, this solution leaves us with a new question: where did the intrusive figure 27 come from?

T H E G R E E K CON N E C T I O N T HE ABSENCE OF AN EXPECTED ELEMENT (a word for Aries) and the presence of
an unexpected one (the superfluous figure 27), taken together, raise the question of whether one might have mutated into the other. In Sanskrit, the possibility seems a remote one. No word used to denote the sign Aries -meṣa, aja, kriya, etc. -has the numerical value 27 either in the frequently used bhūtasaṃkhyā (word-numeral) system or in the less common kaṭapayādi one; and even if they did, a scenario where the primary meaning of such a word would have been overlooked in an astrological context appears highly unlikely. 6 Nor is any of these words, written in the scripts used in northern India in the early centuries of the Common Era (including the Aramaic-derived Kharoṣṭhī), similar in appearance to the numerals 27.
In Greek, on the other hand, the situation is much more promising. Astronomical and astrological papyri often curtail the names of the zodiacal signs using abbreviations of two or three letters, such as κρ or κρι for Κριός "Aries". 7 It is certainly suggestive to note that the first letter of this name is also the first element of the Greek alpha-numeral for 27, κζ. Although considera tions of palaeography in relation to a wholly hypothetical source, for which neither the century nor the region of origin is known, are necessarily speculative, we may further note the similarity between the letters ρ and ζ in cursive forms of Greek writing common from the first to the third centuries CE. 8 On the basis of these observations, we may reconstruct the likely chain of events as follows: in a Greek-language text, an original abbreviation of the name Κριός (or some oblique form of the same) is misread as κζ. These two letters, occurring in the context of a list containing alpha-numerals, are interpreted as meaning 27. Next, this intrusive 27 occurring between the numbers 10 (the exaltation degree of the sun) and 3 (the exaltation degree of the moon) displaces all subsequent figures, leaving a meaning less number 20 at the end of the list. Finally, Mīnarāja does his best with the list as he understands it, enshrin ing the mistake in Sanskrit verse.
The above scenario accounts for Pingree's "complete confusion" in a series of plausible steps. It does, however, seem to preclude any dependence of Mīnarāja on Sphujidhvaja (or on any other Sanskrit source) or vice versa, at least for the topic of exaltations. If the displacement in Mīnarāja's list is due to a misreading of a Greek abbrevia tion, then clearly Mīnarāja used a Greek-language rather than a Sanskrit source for the exaltations. Equally clearly, Sphujidhvaja and the mainstream Sanskrit tradition did not depend on Mīnarāja, as they do not reproduce his displaced values. Yet once that mistake has been corrected, we see that Mīna rāja's work and the mainstream tradition are based on exactly the same scheme of exaltations; therefore both must be derived, independently of each other, from Greek sources. Indeed, we are now able to take the argument one step further: assuming that Pingree's explana tion for the deviant exaltation degrees in the case of the sun and Jupiter is correct, which seems highly likely, the presence of this telltale error both in Mīnarāja's immediate source and in that used by Sphujidhvaja (or his Indian predecessors) suggests the existence of at least two, and possibly more, copies of an astrological text in Greek dependent on the same hyparchetype, in which a θ had been accidentally dropped from the alpha-numeric ιθ and an ι from ιε. 9 What text this may have been, and whether it was authored in the Indo-Greek cultural area or in some other part of the Hellenistic world, we do not know. But it does suggest that, while Pingree may have been partly correct in positing a "bottleneck" text from which all subsequent Indian literature on horoscopy derived, that text was neither Sphujidhvaja's Yavanajātaka nor any other Sanskrit work, but rather a currently unidentified work in the Greek language.

CO NC LU S I O N
T HESE ARGUMENTS CONCERNING THE DOCTRINE OF EXALTATIONS are not intended as blanket statements regarding the sources or intertextuality issues of the Vṛddhayavanajātaka or the Yavanajātaka as a whole. Both works do refer to earlier Sanskrit authors, and the historicity of such claims will no doubt be addressed in the forthcoming edition and translation of the Vṛddhayavanajātaka. 10 At the very least, however, we may be reasonably certain that one of Mīnarāja's sources -presumably an important one, used for a central doctrine near the very beginning of his work -was written in Greek, and therefore that Mīnarāja had some proficiency in that language. In response to a question recently raised by Mak, there thus seems to be some justification for labelling Mīnarāja an Indo-Greek. 11 9 I am not aware of any non-Indian source containing both these deviations. Winkler (2011: 247) reports a figure of "Cancer in [1]5 ∘ " for the exaltation of Jupiter in the imperfectly preserved MS P. Carlsberg 81 (which, as Andreas Winkler informs me in a personal communication, has a hole in the place where the numeral for 10 would be expected); but the same source explicitly gives "Aries in 19 ∘ " as the exaltation of the sun (loc. cit.). 10 This project is currently being pursued jointly by Bill Mak and Ronnie Gale Dreyer. 11 See Mak 2018: 12 f.