While reading the textbook, I found it very disappointing just how close the Greeks were to figuring out that Earth was not the center of the universe. Had they not been fooled by looking for parallax, they would have been led to the right conclusion that the Earth orbits the sun, rather than that everything orbits the Earth. I then set out to look into the history of the heliocentric model a bit more, hoping to find some kind of ancient civilization which successfully concluded that the Earth revolved around the sun before Copernicus.
Although I was unable to find one, I found that the first notion of a heliocentric model of the solar system dated back to 9th Century BCE, credited to an Indian philosopher by the name of Yajnavalkya. Unfortunately, just as was the case with the Greeks, supporters of this model were in the minority and the model was not widely accepted until much later.
Credit for the first heliocentric models successful at predicting the positions of celestial bodies goes to the Indians as well. In his magnum opus Aryabhatiya, Aryabhata (476-550) created a planetary model in which Earth was taken to be spinning on its axis and the planets revolved around the sun. Later, Nilakantha Somayaji (1444 – 1544) proposed a heliocentric model that was even more accurate at predicting the orbits of the planets than was both the Tychonic and Copernican models. It fell short of predicting the movement of the rest of the universe, but many of the astronomers in India seemed to have accepted his planetary model. Despite this, like many things in astronomy, the European model later took over instead.
