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

108 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. we mean to prove is that Uṣhas, or the Goddess of dawn, the first appearance of which was so eagerly and anxiously looked to, and which formed the subject of so many beautiful hymns in the Vedic literature, is not the evanescent dawn of the tropics, but the long, continuous and revolving dawn of the pole; and if we have succeeded in proving this from the passages discussed above, it matters little if a passage or more are found elsewhere in the Ṛig-Veda, describing the ordinary tropical dawn. The Vedic Ṛiṣhis, who sang the present hymns, must have been familiar with the tropical dawn, if they now and then added a 13th month to secure the correspondence of the lunar and the solar year. But the deity of the Dawn was an ancient deity, the attributes of which had become known to the Ṛiṣhis by orally preserved traditions, about the primeval home; and the dawn-hymns, as we now possess them, faithfully describe these characteristics. How these old characteristics of the Goddess of Dawn were preserved for centuries is a question to which I shall revert after examining the whole of the Vedic evidence bearing on the Polar theory. For the present we may assume that these reminiscences of the old home were preserved much in the same way as we have preserved the hymns, accent for accent and letter for letter, for the last three or four thousand years. It will be seen from the foregoing discussion that if the dawn- hymns in the Ṛig-Veda be read and studied in the light of modern scientific discoveries and with the aid of passages in the Atharva- Veda and the Taittirîya Saṁhitâ and Brâhmaṇa, they clearly establish the following results:— (1) The Ṛig-Vedic dawn was so long that several days elapsed between the first appearance of light on the horizon and the sunrise which followed it, (VII, 76, 3,); or,