The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus some 4500 years before vary not even a single minute from the modern tables of Cassini and Meyer. - Jean Sylvain Bailly

The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived Hindus their knowledge.

Even before Jones's announcement, Bailly stated that "the Brahmans are the teachers of Pythagoras, the instructors of Greece and through her of the whole of Europe" (51).

The astronomer and onetime mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, in his Histoire de I'astronomie ancienne et moderne (1805), felt that "these tables of the Brahmana are perhaps five or six thousand years old" (53;). Bailly approved of the traditional date of the Kali Yuga, and seemed to have convinced at least some of his colleagues such as Laplace and Playfair of the accuracy of the Indian astronomical claims (Kay, 1981, 2). This was bitterly opposed by another astronomer, John Bentley ( 1981), with a concern that we have seen was typical for the times: "If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction" (xxvii).