Varāhamihira's pandiagonal magic square of the order four

AbstractI have demonstrated in this paper that Varāhamihira (ca. 550), an Indian authority of astronomy, astrology, and divination, utilized a pandiagonal magic square of sixteen cells in prescribing how to prepare perfumes from sixteen original substances. I have also tried to reconstruct the original magic square underlying Varāhamihira's square, which consists of two sets of the series [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], and have suggested a probable historical link between Indian and Islamic magic squares