वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

ii PREFACE. the due east, i. e., the Vernal equinox, has served to dispel all lingering doubts regarding the age of the Brâhmaṇas; while another Indian astronomer, Mr. V. B. Ketkar, in a recent num- ber of the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has mathematically worked out the statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmaṇa (iii, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was first discovered when confronting or nearly occult- ing the star Tiṣhya, and shewn that the observation was possible only at about 4650 B. C., thereby remarkably confirming my estimate of the oldest period of Vedic literature. After this, the high antiquity of the oldest Vedic period may, I think, be now taken as fairly established. But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried back to 4500 B. C., one was still tempted to ask whether we had, in that limit, reached the ultima Thule of the Aryan anti- quity. For, as stated by Prof. Bloomfield, while noticing my Orion in his address on the occasion of the eighteenth anniver- sary of John Hopkin's University, "the language and literature of the Vedas is, by no means, so primitive as to place with it the real beginnings of Aryan life." "These in all probability and in all due moderation," he rightly observed, "reach back several thousands of years more," and it was, he said, therefore "needless to point out that this curtain, which seems to shut off our vision at 4500 B. C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze." I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time during the last ten years has been devoted to the search of evidence which would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long vista of primitive Aryan antiquity. How I first worked on the lines followed up in Orion, how in the light of latest researches in geology and archæology bearing on the primitive history of man, I was gradually led to a different line of search, and finally how the conclusion, that the ancestors of the Vedic Ṛiṣhis lived in an Arctic home in inter-glacial times, was forced on me by