Emergence of Science:

We gave you a glimpse of  the social structure in  India during the Iron Age. With the emergence of ordered urban societies, the stage was set for a tremendodevelopment  in science and technology. We will now describe, in brief,  the advances  in various areas of  science,  such as astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, botany and zoology.Astronomy and Mathematics We have described earlier the level of  knowledge in astronomy in the Rigvedic  times. Mucof  the later work  in astronomy in  this period  is merely a detailed or expanded version of thastronomical knowledge already found in Rig Veda. We could, perhaps, understand this feature if we realise that the developments  in astronomy in  this period, stem mainly from tastrological practices of  sacrificial ceremonies. As a matter of  fact, astronomy degeneratedinto astrology in  the later years of  this period. You already know about the Sulvasutras which we described in Sec. They show a fairly high level of  knowledge of  geometry. Arithmetic was equally well developed. Numbers in multiples of  10  going up to as high powers of  10, as 10¹²  (one million million)were known and used. All the arithmetic operations on numbers were also known. Sulvasutras contain several instances of  addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and squaring of  fractions. Quadratic equations, indeterminate equations, permutations and combinations also appear in the Sulvasutras.