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

THE VEDIC DAWNS. 93 inhabitants of the place. In the first chapter of the Old Testa- ment we were told that God created the heaven and the earth and also light "on the first day;" while the sun was created on the fourth "to divide the day from the night and to rule the day." Here the word 'day' is used to denote a period of time even before the sun was created; and a fortiori, there can be no impropriety in using it to denote a period of time before sun- rise. We need not, therefore, affect a hypercritical spirit in exa- mining the Vedic expression in question. If Sâyaṇa did it, it was because he did not know as much about the Polar regions as we now do. We have no such excuse, and must, therefore, accept the meaning which follows from the natural construction and reading of the sentence. It is therefore clear that the verse in question (VII, 76, 3) expressly describes a dawn continuously lasting for many days, which is possible only in the Arctic regions. I have discussed the passage at so much length because the history of its interpreta- tion clearly shows how certain passages in the Ṛig-Veda, which are unintelligible to us in spite of their simple diction, have been treated by commentators, who know not what to make of them if read in a natural way. But to proceed with the subject in hand, we have seen that the Polar dawn could be divided into periods of 24 hours owing to the circuits it makes round the horizon. In such a case we can very well speak of these divisions as so many day- long dawns of 24 hours each, and state that so many of them are past and so many are yet to come, as has been done in the verse (I, 113, 10) discussed above. We may also say that so many day-long dawns have passed, and yet the sun has not risen, as in II, 28, 9, a verse addressed to Varuṇa, wherein the poet asks for the following boon from the deity:—