Yojana

A yojana is a measure of distance that was used in ancient India, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar. Some sources defining 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 15 km.

Edicts of Ashoka (3rd century BCE)

, in his Major Rock Edict No.13, gives a distance of 600 yojanas between the Maurya empire, and "where the Yona king named Antiyoga ", identified as King Antiochus II Theos, whose capital was Babylon. A range of estimates, for the length of a yojana, based on the ~2,000 km from Baghdad to Kandahar, on the eastern border of the empire, to the ~4,000 km to the Capital at Patna, have been offered by historians.

The [Mahabharata] (500 BCE – 300 CE)

Offers:
Given the Moon's diameter is now known to be approximately 3,475 km and mean radius of 21,833 km, while the Sun's diameter is approximately 1,391,400 km, the stated values offer conflicting lengths for a yojana, in the verse, between - 0.316 km and 139.14 km.

Yojana in geodesy

Hindu units of length

Units

In Hindu scriptures, Paramāṇu is the fundamental particle and smallest unit of length.

Measurement	Equivalence	Notes
8 to 30 Paramāṇus	1 trasareṇu	As per Manusmriti, one trasareṇu is the size of the smallest moving speck of dust visible to the naked eye.
8 trasarenu	1 bālāgra
8 bālāgra	1 likhsha
8 liksha	1 yūka
8 yūka	1 yava
8 yava	1 aṅgula	Estimated between to.
6 finger	1 pada	other sources define this unit differently: see Pada
2 pada	1 vitasti	~ 22.86 cm
2 vitasti	1 hasta	~ 45.7 cm
2 hasta	1 náriká	~ 91.5 cm
2 náriká	1 dhanu	~ 183 cm to 192 cm
1 paurusa	a man's height with arms and fingers uplifted	~ 192 cm
2,000 dhanu	1 gavyuti or gorutam	~ 3.66 to 3.84 km
4 gavyuti	1 yojana	~ 15 kilometers

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''