Wikipedia / Yojana
Wikipedia / Yojana
A yojana (Devanagari: योजन; Khmer language: យោជន៍; ; ) is a measure of distance that was used in ancient India, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar. Some sources define the unit as the distance an army can march in a day. Various textual sources from ancient India define Yojana as ranging from 3.5 to 15km.
Edicts of Ashoka (3rd century BCE)
Ashoka, in his Major Rock Edict No.13, gives a distance of 600 yojanas between the Maurya empire, and "where the Yona king named Antiyoga (is ruling)", identified as King Antiochus II Theos, whose capital was Babylon. A range of estimates, for the length of a yojana, based on the ~2,000km from Baghdad to Kandahar, on the eastern border of the empire, to the ~4,000km to the Capital at Patna, have been offered by historians.
The MahabharataMahabharata (500 BCE – 300 CE)
Offers:
Given the Moon's diameter is now known to be approximately 3,475km and mean radius of 21,833km, while the Sun's diameter is approximately 1,391,400km, the stated values offer conflicting lengths for a yojana, in the verse, between - 0.316km and 139.14km.
Yojana in geodesy
Hindu units of length
Units
In Hindu scriptures, Paramāṇu is the fundamental particle and smallest unit of length.
Variations in length
The length of the yojana varied over time and locale, its length has been estimated as:
- 14th-century mathematician Paramesvara.
- A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada throughout his translations of the Bhagavata Purana.
to - From The Ancient Geography of India, 1871, Alexander Cunningham, estimated by comparison with Chinese units of length.
- 1997, Thompson, from dividing the earths diameter by the yojana circumferences offered In the Surya Siddhanta and Aryabhatiya (late 4th-century to 5th-century CE)
See also
References
Notes
Sources
Further reading
The Artha Shaastra of Kautilya, Penguin Books