Overview

Though there remain essential questions concerning the age of Indian literature, a timeframe of sophisticated ideas from about 1500 B.C. indicates that Indian astronomy and physical thought were on a par with that of Babylonia and Egypt. Some historians have pushed this date back to 6000 B.C. and earlier based on claims that the oral transmission of such ideas far precede written records. Ancient Hindu sources from around 1500 B.C. indicate the existence of advanced concepts of basic astronomical awareness of movement for five planets and the Sun and Moon, and their application to cosmological time cycles, or solar calendars. Other claims suggest an understanding of relative astronomical motions (specifically rotation of the Earth and the Sun as center of the planets), sphericity of Earth, flattened poles of the Earth, and the concept of fundamental matter as atoms.

Some of these...