The Texts · Ancient & Specialized Classics
Yavanajātaka
यवनजातक
Sphujidhvaja · Pingree dated the versification to 269/270 CE from a prose original of 149/150 CE; Mak (2013) showed those date-verse readings rest on emendation and redated the text to c. 4th–6th century CE · jataka
On the dating: Pingree’s reconstruction (Greek original c. 120 CE; Yavaneśvara’s prose 149/150; Sphujidhvaja’s verses 269/270) was overturned by Bill Mak’s re-examination using a newly available Nepalese manuscript: the crucial bhūtasaṁkhyā readings (including the famous "zero") are Pingree’s own emendations. Mak dates the received text between the 4th and 6th centuries CE, with an earlier prose transmission possible; the Indian commentators treated Yavaneśvara and Sphujidhvaja as one person.
What this text is
The key early witness of Greco-Indian horoscopy in Sanskrit — and the corpus’s most instructive dating dispute, stated here with both sides.
About 79 chapters: signs, decans and horās, planets in signs and places, yogas, horary and military astrology, and the astronomical final chapter that carries the disputed date verses.
Its role in this app
Seats foundations, planets-in-signs, divisional-chart vocabulary and planets-in-houses as the earliest reachable stratum — for example, the exaltation-degree conditional on Sun-in-Aries (XII.1–2) is already present here, which keeps our shipped prose honest about degree-conditioned results.
Editions our research holds
suvratsut-edition
Clean re-typeset of Pingree’s English translation — the workhorse.
in copyright — read for verification only, never republished · scan quality: good
pingree-critical-edition
Pingree’s Harvard 1978 critical edition, vols. 1–2 — poor scans.
in copyright — read for verification only, never republished · scan quality: poor
Readings on this site cite texts at chapter level, with verse numbers only where our research verified the passage in a named edition. How conflicts between texts are resolved is documented on the conventions page.