Qhen nowadays we hear opportunist demagogues deploring the supposed congenital civilizational backwardness of the Hindus due to their confrontation with the ancestral Western civilization, we just want to laugh. “At the end of the first millennium BC, Sanskrit texts began to reveal the sophisticated geometry and mathematical astronomy techniques needed to align Vedic rituals with the movements of the heavens,” writes William Dalrymple, noting how these ideas interacted with others from various places in the centuries before Alexander the Great. “The arrival of the Macedonian legions in 326 BC brought Indian scholars into direct contact with the astronomical discoveries of the Ancient Greeks, and by the time of Emperor Azoca, in the middle of the 3rd century BC, India had adopted the 12 signs of the zodiac, originally Babylonian, as well as Hellenic spherical geometry, celestial coordinate systems and string trigonometry. basic…”