Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-seven princesses, a war between gods and giants, and shadows that give birth to planets. In this fascinating study, first published in Calcutta in 1823 and reissued here in the 1825 edition, John Bentley (c.1750 1824) strives to strip back the mythical aspects of the stories to reveal their foundations. He points out that early Hindu astronomers divided the night sky into twenty-seven sections; that a solar eclipse could have been described as an...
Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-sev...
Making one's way through the dense jungle of Old Japanese poetry and prose can be a daunting and discouraging task because of the complex writing systems used during the Asuka (550-710 CE) and Nara (710-789 CE) eras. The intricate script is a bewildering mix of Chinese characters employed for their semantic or phonetic value or as hints to other words--or even for word games.
For the first time in English, this dictionary lists all 1,215 Chinese characters used as phonograms (ongana) or vernacular characters (kungana) in Old Japanese texts. It brings together a vast amount of data...
Making one's way through the dense jungle of Old Japanese poetry and prose can be a daunting and discouraging task because of the complex writing s...
