The Date and Nature of Sphujidhvaja’s Yavanajātaka Reconsidered in the Light of Some Newly Discovered Materials
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since Pingree's 1978 publication of his work on the Yavanajātaka, the text had established itself as one of the most important historical documents in various fields of Indology, from the history of mathematics and astral science, to Indian chronology and historical contacts among ancient cultures. A number of Pingree's discoveries concerning the text were widely quoted by scholars in the past decades. These discoveries may be summarized as follows: The Yavanajātaka was an astrological/astronomical work composed in 269/270 CE. by Sphujidhvaja, an "Indianized Greek" who lived in the realm of the Western Kṣatrapas. The work was a versification of a prose original in Greek composed by Yavaneśvara in Alexandria in 149/150 CE. The work, though highly corrupted and clumsily expressed, contains algorithms of "ultimately Babylonian origin" and the earliest reference to the decimal place-value with a symbol for zero (bindu). Pingree's discoveries were based largely on readings from the last section of the Yavanajātaka, described by him as "Chapter 79 - Horāvidhiḥ", an exposition of mathematical astronomy. In the recent years, scholars including Shukla (1989) and Falk (2001) pointed out some major flaws in some of Pingree's interpretations and reconstitution of the text. However, further progress of a proper reevaluation of the controversial contents of this chapter has so far been hampered by the lack of a better manuscript. In 2011-2012, additional materials including a hitherto unreported copy of the Yavanajātaka became available to the present author. This paper will therefore be the first attempt to reexamine Pingree's key interpretations of the Yavanajātaka, focusing on this last chapter, in the light of the new textual evidences.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it