One of the most interesting things you can read about imo, is yoga scriptures and just how much the Hindus knew 1000 BC+ which WE only recently discovered through modern science.
Ancient Hindu Scientific Knowledge Years Ahead of Its Time
While the ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Ptolemy are widely credited as the fathers of Western science and philosophy, the ancient Hindu scholars had already formulated and written about numerous groundbreaking scientific concepts thousands of years earlier. Their advanced wisdom represented a much earlier birth of scientific thought and inquiry in ancient India.
Mathematics
The concept of zero as a placeholder digit with operational value was first established in Hindu mathematics texts like the Brahmasputha around 500 AD. However, it took another 1,300 years for this revolutionary idea to take root in the West after being transmitted from India to the Arabic world and finally to European mathematicians.
Hindu mathematicians like Aryabhata had already calculated the value of Pi, devised algebraic equations, understood negative numbers and squared roots - all between the 5th to 12th centuries. These fundamental mathematical concepts were alien to scholars in ancient Greece, Persia or China until over a millennium after the Hindus.
Astronomy
Ancient Hindu texts going back to the Vedic period from 1500-500 BC described the spherical shape of the Earth, rotation on its axis causing day/night, elliptical planetary orbits around the Sun, and accurate calculations of planetary movements and their periods of revolution. The heliocentric model and notion of planets orbiting the Sun was first proposed in the 5th century by Aryabhata - nearly 1200 years before Copernicus' famous theory.
For centuries, the prevailing cosmological beliefs in other ancient civilizations like Greece, Persia, China and the Islamic world maintained that the Earth was the static center of the universe around which all celestial bodies revolved. Yet Hindu astronomy from ancient times had stunningly accurate models of planetary motion and the wider cosmos.
Atomic Theory
The idea that all matter is comprised of indestructible atoms can be found described with astonishing clarity in the ancient Hindu Vedas from around 600 BC. Maharishi Kanada of the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy formulated one of the earliest atomic theories around this time, stating that atoms can neither be created nor destroyed - nearly 2,500 years before John Dalton's atomic model in 1808.
For over two millennia after the Hindu sages, most of the ancient world from Greece to the Islamic world had only vague or completely incorrect notions of atomic theory and the nature of matter.
Medicine & Biology
The roots of modern medicine and surgery can truly be traced to the ancient Hindu system of Ayurveda, which described intricate concepts of human anatomy, preventive medicine, embryology, genetics, and metabolic processes several centuries before Hippocrates or Galen.
Advanced surgical procedures like rhinoplasty, cataract treatments and skin grafting were being performed in ancient India dating back to the 6th century BC Shushruta's medical texts. Such sophisticated techniques would not be "rediscovered" in Europe until the 16th century AD at the earliest.
From astronomy to mathematics, chemistry to biology, the ancient Hindus made numerous groundbreaking scientific discoveries and insights millennia before they would be replicated or accepted by the rest of the ancient world.
