The assimilation of Hellenistic-origin geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy into Sanskrit exact sciences during the early 1700s at the court of Maharaja Jai Singh at Jaipur was based mostly on Islamic texts. For example, Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest provided the source material for elegant classical Sanskrit treatises entitled "Line-computation" and "Supreme astronomical treatise", respectively. But the Sanskrit panditas who composed those works also collaborated with Jesuit clerics on the study and translation of these sciences from (Christian) Latin sources. To aid them in understanding and translating the recently published Tabulae astronomicae of Philippe de La Hire, these scholars created and adapted a Sanskrit vocabulary and presentation of early modern Latin conic sections theory. This talk explores the relationship between contemporary Latin texts and diagrams on ellipses and their Sanskrit transformation in the prose text "European lunar diagram exposition".

It is well known that the transmission of knowledge was oral which leads to think that the diagrams relevant for explaining any concept was completely absent. However, every text has a chapter entitled parilekhana, giving details on how to present an event, for example an eclipse, as a diagram. We have studied several medieval period texts with the aim of understanding the technique of preparing drawings. We plan to present some examples from these texts which discuss the intricate details of the drawing procedure – for example, it clearly states the difference between the east-west reversals in the perception. We also include examples for śṛingonnati, the depiction of the orientation of the cusps of the moon.

Building on the foundation laid by an earlier project dedicated to the digital scholarly edition of astronomical tables (https://dishas.obspm.fr/), as well as on the substantial progress made in recent decades in the study of mathematical diagrams, a new collective initiative was launched in 2023: the EIDA project. This project aims to address the challenges associated with the analysis and digital edition of astronomical diagrams.

The EIDA team brings together a broad range of expertise in the history of astral sciences from the 8th to the 18th centuries, encompassing sources in Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Ethiopian. The team also includes specialists in digital humanities and computer vision. Together, we work to analyze both the documentary aspects of astronomical diagrams—such as their means of production, visual conventions, and patterns of circulation—and their epistemic dimensions, including types of diagrams, relationships to accompanying texts, and roles in reasoning and argumentation.

Our objectives are twofold: to develop a critical framework for studying the unique characteristics of diagrammatic transmission; to create digital representations of astronomical diagrams that support these analyses by providing new scholarly tools for visualizing and publishing research on these diagrams. In this presentation, I will briefly introduce some of the initial inquiries undertaken within the EIDA project and hopefully engage with the panelists on the particular challenges posed by diagrams found in Asian sources.