Surya Siddhanta
[5] The Surya Siddhanta text is composed of verses made up of two lines, each broken into two halves, or pãds, of eight syllables each.
[3] As per al-Biruni, the 11th-century Persian scholar and polymath, a text named the Surya Siddhanta was written by Lāṭadeva, a student of Aryabhatta I.
[8][9] The second verse of the first chapter of the Surya Siddhanta attributes the words to an emissary of the solar deity of Hindu mythology, Surya, as recounted to an asura called Maya at the end of Satya Yuga, the first golden age from Hindu texts, around two million years ago.
[4] It treats Earth as stationary globe around which Sun orbits, and makes no mention of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
[3] In a work called the Pañca-siddhāntikā composed in the sixth century by Varāhamihira, five astronomical treatises are named and summarised: Paulīśa-siddhānta, Romaka-siddhānta, Vasiṣṭha-siddhānta, Sūrya-siddhānta, and Paitāmaha-siddhānta.
: 50 Most scholars place the surviving version of the text variously from the 4th-century to 5th-century CE,[19][20] although it is dated to about the 6th-century BCE by Markandaya and Srivastava.
[22] According to Kim Plofker, large portions of the more ancient Sūrya-siddhānta was incorporated into the Panca siddhantika text, and a new version of the Surya Siddhanta was likely revised and probably composed around 800 CE.
Narayan obtained a match for the nakshatra latitudinal data in the period 7300-7800 BCE based on a computer simulation.
[24] The Surya Siddhanta is a text on astronomy and time keeping, an idea that appears much earlier as the field of Jyotisha (Vedanga) of the Vedic period.
[26] According to mathematician and classicist David Pingree, in the Hindu text Atharvaveda (~1000 BCE or older) the idea already appears of twenty eight constellations and movement of astronomical bodies.
The mathematics and devices for time keeping mentioned in these ancient Sanskrit texts, proposes Pingree, such as the water clock may also have thereafter arrived in India from Mesopotamia.
However, Yukio Ôhashi considers this proposal as incorrect,[27] suggesting instead that the Vedic timekeeping efforts, for forecasting appropriate time for rituals, must have begun much earlier and the influence may have flowed from India to Mesopotamia.
[35] The influence of Greek ideas on early medieval era Indian astronomical theories, particularly zodiac symbols (astrology), is broadly accepted by the Western scholars.
[33] According to Pingree, the 2nd-century CE cave inscriptions of Nasik mention sun, moon and five planets in the same order as found in Babylon, but "there is no hint, however, that the Indian had learned a method of computing planetary positions in this period".
[36] According to mathematician and historian of measurement John Roche, the astronomical and mathematical methods developed by Greeks related arcs to chords of spherical trigonometry.
[37] The Surya Siddhanta was one of the two books in Sanskrit that were translated into Arabic in the later half of the eighth century during the reign of Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur.
[15] The Surya Siddhanta was one of the two books in Sanskrit translated into Arabic in the later half of the eighth century during the reign of Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur.
[40] The contents of the Surya Siddhanta is written in classical Indian poetry tradition, where complex ideas are expressed lyrically with a rhyming meter in the form of a terse shloka.
It is a compendium of astronomy that is easier to remember, transmit and use as reference or aid for the experienced, but does not aim to offer commentary, explanation or proof.
This translates as "On both sides of the Meru (i.e. the north and south poles of the earth) the two polar stars are situated in the heaven at their zenith.
[3] The text describes some of its formulae with the use of very large numbers for "divya-yuga", stating that at the end of this yuga, Earth and all astronomical bodies return to the same starting point and the cycle of existence repeats again.
According to Muzaffar Iqbal, this translation and that of Aryabhata was of considerable influence on geographic, astronomy and related Islamic scholarship.
