Yavaneśvara was an astronomer of western or northwestern India who lived in the mid-second century CE. He is said to have rendered a Greek treatise on astrology into Sanskrit. Sphujidhvaja, who wrote the Yavanajātaka (the Ionian Horoscopy) in the year 269–70 CE, says that his work is a verse rendition of Yavaneśvara’s prose text.
Yavaneśvara (lord of the Yavanas or Ionian Greeks) seems to have been a title in use among the ruling elites of western India in the second and third centuries, patronized by the so-called western Kṣatrapa rulers. India’s contacts with Greece were established after Alexander invaded the Indus valley in 327–25 BCE and left behind several satraps to administer the region. Following the departure and demise of Alexander, some of these satraps disintegrated, while others developed into principalities in their own right. Greek officials like Megasthenes, Daimachus, and Nearchus traveled in different parts of India, and there were Greek embassies in the court of the...
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Devadevan, M.V. (2015). Yavaneśvara. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10314-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10314-1
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