The Rigveda

[kak at max.ee.lsu.edu]

Several colleagues have urged me to announce on this network
the discovery of an astronomical code in the Rigveda.
Several papers on this code are in the process of publication.
Two papers that have just appeared in print are:

Subhash Kak, "Astronomy of the Vedic altars and the Rigveda",
Mankind Quarterly, vol 33, 1992, pp. 43-55.

Subhash Kak, "Astronomy in the Shatapatha Brahmana", Indian J. of 
the History of Science, vol. 28, 1993, pp. 14-33.

I shall give the exact references of the other papers in the series
as soon as they appear in print in the various scholarly journals.

The Rigveda has been studied extensively in the West for more than
a hundred years (and it has been studied for centuries in India) but
no one had suspected that an astronomical code existed in the
organization of the book.  This decipherment is based on several
pieces of interlocking evidence within the organization,
as well as corroborating evidence from other ancient texts.
The decipherment shows that the Vedic Indians were keen observers
and they had determined that the sun was 108 sun-diameters away
from the earth and the moon was 108 moon-diameters away from the earth.
They reconciled the solar and the lunar years through a 95 year 
correction cycle.  This means that their solar year was equal
to 365.24675 days which is a remarkably accurate value.
They were also interested in many abstract properties of numbers.

This work also suggests that the astronomical code was forgotten
in India about 3000 years ago.  This provides a time-marker to
determine the age of composition of
many ancient books that explicitly use this astronomical code.
Figuratively, the decipherment provides a new Rosetta
stone to study the Rigveda which is like a Stonehenge in text.
Other scholars have expressed great excitement with characterization of
this work in terms such as `revolutionary' and `monumental'.

The discovery of the astronomical code of the Rigveda
implies that the traditional view that Vedic knowledge has
three aspects, namely the cosmos, the nature, and the man
stands vindicated.