Brhat Samhita of Varahamihira

Varahamihira's sixth century Brhat Samhita, translated with exhaustive notes by M. Ramakrishna Bhat and published by Motilal Banarsidass, a long established Indological academic press founded in 1903, is a scholarly critical translation of a primary text. Its strength is that Bhat's translation carries real scholarly apparatus around a major classical Sanskrit encyclopedic work covering astrology, astronomy and omens. Its limit is specific and worth naming directly: chapters 68 to 70 are a sixth century encyclopedic treatment of physiognomy generally, not a dedicated palmistry manual, and its classical Sanskrit terminology is not automatically the same as modern Hindi popular palmistry line names, so any single line name claim drawn from it needs its own direct check.