KENGO HARIMOTO
Tohoku University k.harimoto@gmail.com
CHRONOLOGICAL STRATIFICATION IN THE EPICS AND PURĀṆAS: EVIDENCE FROM STYLOMETRIC SERIATION
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) applied to stylometric distances among the Sanskrit epics and Purāṇas consistently reveals seriation along an axis that correlates with the broadly accepted relative chronology of these texts. This paper presents and interprets that pattern across a systematic comparison of feature sets and preprocessing choices—word unigrams versus character trigrams, and sandhied versus unsandhied input—and examines how various distance metrics affect the clarity and stability of the chronological axis. While one axis robustly captures temporal stratification across most feature–metric combinations, the secondary axis proves more interpretively variable, appearing to reflect genre, geographical region, or sectarian affiliation depending on the configuration. The consistency of chronological seriation across these methodological variations strengthens the case that stylometric signal in this corpus is substantially driven by diachronic linguistic drift, at least along one dimension. We close by discussing the implications for using stylometry as a dating tool for Sanskrit literary texts, and the limits of MDS as an interpretive framework when axes resist stable semantic labelling.