Aryabhatiya

Aryabhatiya (IAST: Āryabhaṭīya) or Aryabhatiyam (Āryabhaṭīyaṃ), a Sanskrit astronomical treatise, is the magnum opus and only known surviving work of the 5th century Indian mathematician, Aryabhata.

Structure and style

The text is written in Sanskrit and divided into four sections, covering a total of 121 verses that describe different results using a mnemonic style typical for such works in India.

1. Gitikapada: (13 verses): large units of time—kalpa, manvantra, and yuga—which present a cosmology different from earlier texts such as Lagadha's Vedanga Jyotisha(ca. 1st century BCE). There is also a table of sines (jya), given in a single verse. The duration of the planetary revolutions during a mahayuga is given as 4.32 million years.

2. Ganitapada (33 verses): covering mensuration (kṣetra vyāvahāra), arithmetic and geometric progressions, gnomon / shadows (shanku-chhAyA), simple, quadratic, simultaneous, and indeterminate equations (kuTTaka)

3. Kalakriyapada (25 verses): different units of time and a method for determining the positions of planets for a given day, calculations concerning the intercalary month (adhikamAsa), kShaya-tithis, and a seven-day week with names for the days of week.

Vedic period

The Vedic period (or Vedic age) (c. 1500 – c. 500 BCE) was the period in Indian history during which the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, were composed.

During the early part of the Vedic period, the Indo-Aryans settled into northern India, bringing with them their specific religious traditions. The associated culture (sometimes referred to as Vedic civilisation) was initially a tribal, pastoral society centred in the northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent; it spread after 1200 BCE to the Ganges Plain, as it was shaped by increasing settled agriculture, a hierarchy of four social classes, and the emergence of monarchical, state-level polities. Scholars consider Vedic civilisation to have been a composite of the Indo-Aryan and Harappan cultures.

The end of the Vedic period witnessed the rise of large, urbanised states as well as of shramana movements (including Jainism and Buddhism) which challenged the Vedic orthodoxy. Around the beginning of the Common Era, the Vedic tradition formed one of the main constituents of the so-called "Hindu synthesis".