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

MONTHS AND SEASONS. 149 —Indicates darkness of the long night—Not made up by combining any two consecutive seasons out of six—The ex- planation in the Brâhmaṇas improbable—Summary. Starting with the tradition about the half-yearly night of the gods found everywhere in Sanskrit literature, and also in the Avesta, we have found direct references in the Ṛig-Veda to a long continuous dawn of thirty days, the long day and the long night, when the sun remained above the horizon or went below it for a number of 24 hours ; and we have also seen that the Ṛig-Vedic texts describe these things as events of a bye-gone age. The next question, therefore, is—Do we meet in the Vedas with similar traces of the Arctic condition of seasons, months or years? It is stated previously that the calendar current at the time of the Vedic Saṁhitâs was different from the Arctic calendar. But if the ancestors of the Vedic people ever lived near the North Pole, “we may,” as observed by Sir Norman Lockyer with reference to the older Egyptian calendar, “always reckon upon the conservatism of the priests of the temples retaining the tradition of the old rejected year in every case.” Sir Norman Lockyer first points out how the ancient Egyptian year of 360 days was afterwards replaced by a year of 365 days; and then gives two instances of the traditional practice by which the memory of the old year was preserved. “Thus even at Philæ in later times,” says he, “in the temple of Osiris, there were 360 bowls for sacrifice, which were filled daily with milk by a specified rotation of priests. At Acanthus there was a perforated cask into which one of the 360 priests poured water from the Nile daily.”* And what took place in Egypt, we may expect to have taken place in Vedic times. The characteristics of an Arctic year are so unlike those of a year in the temperate zone, that if the ancestors of the Vedic

• See Lockyer’s Dawn of Astronomy, p. 248.