A Disputed Date and What Rests on It

The dating question is not academic housekeeping. If the text can be placed in the third century CE it becomes the earliest datable evidence for horoscopic astrology in India and a fixed point for the whole chronology of the transmission. The influential twentieth century edition read the closing verses as supplying such a date, and that reading was widely adopted and built upon.

Later work on the manuscript evidence has argued that the reading is mistaken, that the verses will not bear the interpretation placed on them, and that the edition reconstructed damaged passages in ways that assumed the conclusion. The dispute is genuine and the scholars on both sides are working from the same limited manuscript material, which is in poor condition. The consequence is that a number of confident statements in the general literature about when Greek astrology reached India rest on a contested reading of a few damaged lines, and are repeated without the qualification. The atlas states the position as contested rather than choosing a side. What would settle it is further manuscript evidence rather than further argument about the verses already known, and that is a matter for Sanskrit philology and the history of the exact sciences rather than for astrology.