The astronomy hidden in the number 339
Chronology issues
In Aswin Subramanyan’s interesting article on Indian cosmology, Part 1, he expresses his discomfort with Western explanations of the Indian timeline and Indian astronomy. In my own research, I have often had the same doubts and felt as if Western spearheads into Indian astronomy were often copied, but their opinions or biases were never questioned. According to them, the Indians learned everything they knew from the Greeks. Pioneers as they undoubtedly were, have the great merit opening new paths and leading the way but they are followed by other researchers with different mindsets, coming from other backgrounds who question the findings of those who came before them. Inquisitive minds should not be afraid but rather be open to being challenged.
However, this verdict that the Indians learned everything from the Greeks feels more and more like an elephant in the room, specially in light of Michael Danino’s excellent research on the disappearance of the river Saraswati, whose beauty and majesty are mentioned many times in the Rigveda. His geological quest is revolutionary, almost like Schoch’s dating of the Sphinx. The reason is that the river was dry by 1900 BCE. Since it was so “mighty,” the Rigveda must be dated to some time before the river went dry.
Superheros and hidden information
I have always been fascinated by the richness of Indian mythology. The stories are long and incredibly intertwined, and it is very easy to get confused. But what struck me in the first place was the continuous allusions to the cosmos, well beyond the Earth and the sky. One of my favorite stories is that of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, a clear description of the precession of the equinoxes.
The thing about Indian cosmology is that they don’t spell out technical terms. And why would they? Anybody who has actually studied these phenomena will understand. The rest would simply read a nice tale, and the more powerful the story’s hero was depicted, the more he or she would be remembered. Let us remind ourselves that Hollywood still makes a lot of money with movies like Superman, The Avengers, Batman, Iron Man, The Incredibles, and similar films. The superhero is never out of fashion, and every country has its own. And India beats them all. Their sky and temples are populated with superheroes. All of them have particular tokens, and many figures had different significations depending on context and translation.
Just consider the word seal. It can refer to a marine mammal or to a stamp. It can also be a noun or a verb. This is, of course, what makes translations – in particular from dead languages – so difficult. Now add to a language soup of possible translations also numbers, which sometimes seem to appear randomly.
A nice example is a paragraph found the Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa (PB 16.8.6.) that can be translated as
The world of heaven is as far removed from this world, they say, as a thousand cows standing the one above one another.
While this is very easy to imagine (my mind creates funny images indeed!) it is more difficult to consider this a serious astronomical reference.
A different translation reads:
The world of heaven is as far removed from this world, they say, as a thousand earths stacked one above the other.
Well, this reads much more like a clear indication of distance expressed in diameters!
But while this example directly uses the number 1000 in the sentence, there are other, much more subtle ways to embed numbers without anybody noticing it -or nearly. Those numbers are used like a secret language, or encrypted code.
Subhash Kak has pointed out how the entire Rigveda is not only based on specific poetry metres, but that those metres correspond to precise and verifiable astronomical data. Indeed, the entire text can be considered an incredible piece of Sudoku, where each number either corresponds to an astronomical unit or a specific common multiple or divisor. The counting of syllables, paragraphs, and hymns follows a precise yet very sophisticated astronomical code.
The number 339
One of the numbers that is at the base of the entire Rigveda is the number 339. Indians have many sacred numbers, and a superficial reader might assume that an entire continent is just a little too superstitious when it comes to numbers. But I always wondered why specific numbers would show up in myths and tales if not for conveying important information, rather than being mysteriously bringers of good luck.
Superstition usually does not convey much knowledge by itself, but it does embed fear—fear that something will happen if the lucky numbers are not respected. And this sticks in the memory of generations. Like the number 13, for example. Who does not “know” that 13 is an “unlucky” number? On the other hand, if we learn that a numerical combination is our “lucky number,” wouldn’t we try to use it, just in case? Don’t the global lotteries work just on this idea?
If certain numbers were indeed destined to carry a particular meaning or message, they needed to be repeated again and again in order to keep them alive and to ensure they would survive, no matter what happened to the carrier story or even the culture the code originated from. Someday, somebody would understand why those numbers would turn up again and again, start to research, and then, hopefully, understand what they truly meant.
And indeed the number 339 is astonishing and implies the knowledge of advanced astronomy AND simple geometry. However, it requires the understanding of THE most sacred number in India before digging into it. Please refer to my article about the number 108 here where I show how the diameter of the Sun fits exactly 108 times into the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
The analemma
If we were to observe the Sun’s position every day from the same place at the same hour of the say we would see how the Sun rises higher and higher in the sky while it also movers from true East (on the vernal equinox) towards the South (on the Summer Solstice) and then to the South West, where the luminary inverts the direction (on the autumn equinox) and comes back.
The Sun seems to write a big eight in the sky, a figure that is called analemma. In more technical terms, the analemma shows the solar declination, that goes from 0° (vernal equinox) to 23°26’ (summer solstice) to 0° (autumn equinox) and then to 23°26’ at the winter solstice.
The calculation of the solar steps
The idea of the number 339 is similar and yet different. The concepts aims to link the real solar diameter which is 1,392,700 km with the apparent Solar diameter as seen from Earth, which is 32’ (arc seconds) or 0,5333. Basically the ancient astronomers wanted to see how many times the apparent solar disc would enter in a 360° circle of the Sun’s apparent motion around the Earth. It basically compares the apparent solar disc to the apparent solar path around the Earth.
And now we need to proceed in three steps.
1) Check the apparent size
The Sun’s apparent diameter is 32’. If we divide 360 by 32’ we come up with 675. This describes how many times the solar disk enters in the entire 360°. But the Sun is visible only during the day, so we need to divide 675 by two in order to calculate the diurnal arc, the result is 337°30.
2) Check astronomical data
- The true diameter of the Sun is 1,392,700 km.
- The distance between the Sun and the Earth is 149,597,870 km
If we divide the Sun’s diameter by the Sun-Earth distance, the result is 107,416, rounded to the next whole number we get 108. In other words, the Sun’s diameter multiplied by 108 gives us the linear distance between the Sun and the Earth.
When we look at the Sun from the Earth, its disk measures 32’ in average. This means that the 32’ which is the apparent size of the Sun as seen from Earth corresponds to the true diameter of the Sun.
Now we need to transform a linear distance into a circular distance:
- transform hours into minutes:
- 360∘x 60=21,600′
=This is the total number of arc minutes in a circle
Number of solar steps in a full circle:
- Divide the minutes in the circle by the minutes of the Sun’s apparent diameter:
- 21,600′/32’=675
Number of solar steps during the day:
- 675/2= 337°30’
3) Use π
Alternatively, the ancient Indians already knew the number π and calculated 108 × π ≈ 339 to directly define the semicircle and this number is rather exact.
Length of the day
Days do not have equal length, therefore the solar steps were not always the same for every day. The length of the solar day varies with the geographical latitude. In other words, it will take 339 solar steps only in certain locations.
- 339 solar steps are required from the Sunrise to the Sunset during the vernal equinox.
- On the summer solstice there were 382 solar steps and
- At the winter solstice the Sun only made 296 steps.
Other astronomical steps were knows among the Babylonians, but these referred to the advancement of declination of a planet and have therefore a different context. The solar steps were unique among the Indians.
© Tania Daniels 2026
Sources:
-Subhash Kak, The Astronomical Code of the Rgveda, Aditya Prakashan, 2019
-Robert Schoch , Robert Bauval, Origins of the Sphinx, Celestial Guardian of per-pharaonic Civilization, Inner traditions, 2017
-Michael Danino, The Lost River, On the trail of the Saraswati, Penguin Books 2010