Pingree. Sanskrit Astronomical Tables in England
David Pingree described the Sanskrit astronomical tables held in English collections, manuscript by manuscript, giving epoch, parameters and textual affiliation. It is a reference work rather than a book to read, but a reference work of a kind that hardly exists for Indian astronomy.
The second half — 'Analysis of tables' — is worth more than the inventories: there Pingree prints the numbers themselves, dhruvankas and differences, by which a table can be identified even when its title is lost.
For us the book did two things. First, it named Makaranda's epoch outright: 'The Makaranda of Makaranda… composed in Saka 1400 = A.D. 1478' — the very epoch we had derived from the corpus through the common factor of four corrections. Second, it said where to look next: Pingree analyses Makaranda's planetary tables not here but in his second catalogue, of American collections, at pages 39b-46b.
That second catalogue — Sanskrit Astronomical Tables in the United States, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 58.3 (1968) — is not available openly: not on archive.org, not anywhere else, only through JSTOR and print on demand.
This book had to be recognised afresh. The text layer on archive.org is useless: the English book was run through a Devanagari model there, and the result is noise. Our own recognition accompanies it.
Details: 187 pages, 6.4 MB.
The book has been recognised: alongside the PDF there is a plain UTF-8 text file whose pages are separated by lines of the form ===== стр N =====, convenient for searching and for quoting with a page reference.