  According to an ancient Indian text (c. 1700 BC?), the heavens are 1000 earth
diameters away from the earth. Other texts took the sun to be halfway to the
heavens, so this suggests a distance of the sun about 500 earth diameters from
the earth. The confirmation for this supposition comes from the later theories
(c. 500 AD) from the same region and from Greek ideas that speak of roughly the
same distance. We suggest that this original conception was transformed by the
later Indian and Greek theories in different ways to deal with contradictory
data related to outer planet periods.
